Chris Bertram

I’m pleased to see that reactionary gadfly Peter Briffa, a playwright himself, has a better appreciation of Harold Pinter’s merits than most of his co-thinkers. (Actually, I doubt Peter has any co-thinkers, but you know what I mean.) The Pinter-reaction prize for unintentional self-reference goes to Christopher Hitchens, who is quoted by Oliver Kamm as writing:

bq. Let us also hope for a long silence to descend upon the thuggish bigmouth who has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage for far too long.

Indeed, Christopher, indeed.

The FP/Prospect poll on top public intellectuals has been published . Not much there that is worthy of comment. Nearly everyone on the list has made a contribution which is either totally ephemeral, or which will simply be absorbed into the body of human knowledge without leaving much trace of its originator. Ideas from Sen, Habermas or Chomsky will survive in some form, but nobody will read _them_ in 100 years. And the rest will be utterly forgotten — or so I predict. Anyway, without further ado, I invite comment on who were the top public intellectuals of 1905. You can comment on either (a) who would actually have topped such a silly poll in 1905 or (b) with hindsight, who turned out to be the top public intellectuals.

Just to get us started — and to cross reference John's post earlier — Trotsky has to be a strong contender under both (a) and (b): Chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet, a major contributor to subsequent events, and still very very readable (My Life, 1905). Over to you …

The excellent Equality Exchange — a repository for papers about the theory and practice of equality from philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, lawyers and economists — has moved. Adjust your bookmarks for the new site, and take the opportunity to have a look around one of the most valuable resources for political theorists and philosophers.

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 . Now, via Amanda , 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 .

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 and James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds 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 :

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 , 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 :

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 , 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 for the Brick Testament 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 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 in Bristol the other day. As you’ll see from the review in Decode magazine , 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 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!