Not the best day for humanity...

...and this time no laughing matter.

What people do to people, part I: as various papers report (this excerpt, for convenience sake, from the Guardian):

The death toll of Iraqi civilians in October was 3,709, the highest monthly total yet, and torture continued to be rampant in the country, a UN report said today. [...]

"Hundreds of bodies continued to appear in different areas of Baghdad handcuffed, blindfolded and bearing signs of torture and execution-style killing," the report said. "Many witnesses reported that perpetrators wear militia attire and even police or army uniforms."

Most of the violence occurred in Baghdad, where nearly 5,000 people died in the two-month period, with many bodies bearing signs of torture and gunshot wounds.

The situation for women continued to deteriorate, with increasing numbers either victims of religious extremists or "honour killings", the UN report added.

"Some non-Muslim women are forced to wear a headscarf and to be accompanied by male relatives or spouses. Kidnappings associated with rape and sex slavery have also occurred," the report said.

Meanwhile, The New Republic, a once energetic supporter of the war, concludes:

There is no policy for Iraq that will provide moral and strategic satisfaction and no reason to believe that we might achieve something that could be plausibly described as victory. The coming debate over timetables and troop levels will likely generate much anger, shattering postelection illusions of bipartisanship and provoking intra-party squabbles. But, in the end, this struggle will be over the difference between a largely intolerable outcome and a completely intolerable one.

Which is nice of them to notice, even if other former regime-change enthusiasts, much to their credit, recognised this somewhat sooner. Of course, recognising the problem and having a solution to this 'Mesopotamian hell' are two different things.

To be honest, my own vision of what would constitute the difference between 'largely intolerable' and 'completely intolerable' has been getting murkier of late.

Speaking of which...

What people do to people part II: also as reported in the Guardian:

There are now 39.5 million living with HIV infection, according to the annual UNAIDS report, released ahead of World Aids Day on December 1, and 4.3 million of those were infected in 2006. That is 400,000 more than were infected in 2004.

Most alarming is the increased prevalence in Uganda, long held up as a showcase to the world of what could be achieved in Africa with campaigning, education and widespread condom use. The report shows a rise from a low of 5.6% infection among men and 6.9% among women in 2000 to 6.5% in men and 8.8% in women in 2004.

The reasons for the increase are not clear, but there has been a shift in the message from Uganda's leadership. Between the early 1990s and early 2000s, HIV prevalence fell sharply in major cities among pregnant women - the group most commonly monitored because they have contact with health services - as President Yoweri Museveni worked to raise awareness of the dangers of HIV and put the authority of his office behind condom use.

But in recent years the message on condoms has been diluted in favour of greater emphasis on sexual abstinence until marriage - in line with the thinking of the Bush administration, which is spending millions of dollars on HIV prevention and treatment. Critics say many women are not in a position to abstain from sex and that many are infected by their husbands.

The report says further research is needed to validate the apparent trend "but the current findings do hint at the possible erosion of the gains Uganda made against Aids in the 1990s". There is evidence of erratic condom use and more men having sex with multiple partners.

What to do? Someone knows, and - much like the Bush administration - he's working round the clock and consulting the best available scientific information in order to come to the rescue....or, well, no, maybe he still needs time to think about it a little bit:

The Vatican's office for health care has concluded a study on the use of condoms in the fight against AIDS, and the long-awaited report on it is now being examined by the Vatican's doctrinal watchdog, a senior cardinal said today.

But the prelate gave no indication of the position the study takes or when a final pronouncement might be made.

Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, who heads the Vatican office for health care, told a news conference on infectious diseases that the document was drafted with the help of scientists, theologians and other experts.

"We have prepared a detailed study on condoms from both the scientific and moral points of view and we have passed our study on to the Congregation for the Faith," Barragan said. "Now the dossier is being studied by that office and then it will go before the pope."

'From both the scientific and moral points of view'. Yes... Do you think that choice of words is significant? Since there's nothing more moral that prohibiting the use of a scientifically well-proven method against a deadly disease. However, if any reminder were necessary what kind of attitudes might be revised by this new report (maybe...remember, we have to consider all the moral evils of condom use...), here are comments from Katha Pollitt from a 2004 issue of The Nation:

Now it seems the Vatican is joining fundamentalist Protestants to spread the word against condoms around the globe. "To talk of condoms as 'safe sex' is a form of Russian roulette," said Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, head of the Vatican's office on the family. On the BBC Panorama program "Sex and the Holy City," Lopez Trujillo explained, "The AIDS virus is roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon. The spermatozoon can easily pass through the 'net' that is formed by the condom." That latex has holes or pores through which HIV (or sperm) can pass is a total canard. A National Institutes of Health panel that included anti-condom advocates examined the effectiveness of condoms from just about every perspective, including strength and porosity; according to its report, released in July 2001, latex condoms are impermeable to even the smallest pathogen. [...]

It's bad enough to argue that condoms are against God's will while millions die. But to maintain, falsely, that they are ineffective in order to discourage their use is truly immoral. If not insane.

Gosh, religion seeking to contradict science. That doesn't happen very often. Does it?

Und jetzt lernen wir das Lachen...

You see, I'm not the only one:

"You notice you're becoming more German when you go to England and things don't work. I was on the London Stansted Airport Express, which costs a bomb and is filthy. There was a Japanese passenger who sat down and his seat collapsed. Everyone laughed. I thought: Welcome to Britain. Collapsing chair, overpriced, laughing at foreigners, and all within 10 minutes of arriving."

So says London Times Berlin correspondent Roger Boyes (via Spiegel International, thanks to Anja for the tip), who has written a new book, My Dear Krauts, about his efforts to understand a country he describes (seemingly affectionately) as full of 'paranoid schizophrenics':

"One minute they're convinced they're total losers and start filling their pants. The next they're fervent patriots who think they know it all. It's completely confusing," says the veteran journalist, who began his career in Bonn in the 1970s and returned to Germany in 1993 after postings in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Italy.

The 2006 World Cup was a case in point, says Boyes, 54. "Weeks beforehand they were saying, 'Oh God we can't get anything right, ticket sales are going wrong, security is going wrong, no one's going to come.' Then the World Cup came and they went all patriotic and were suddenly saying no one does it better."

(So, you see, his frustrations are not only with the British...and what better to bring two nations together than their frustrations?)

There's an excerpt from the book at the Spiegel site (in English), which is quite nice but which does...almost inevitably...mention the war.

Where Boyles, however, does seem to go wrong is in the assumption that Germans are not funny. They are, but it takes some time to get the hang of German humour.

Earlier this year, in the run-up to the World Cup (when, briefly, it seemed that at least some British people had an interest in Germany which for a change did not involve Where Eagles Dare style cliches), Stuart Lee examined the peculiarities of German humour. I'm not sure that he's entirely right, but he does say a few insightful things:

The geographical accident of Germany has denied Germans the fun we have with language, and it seemed to me that their sense of humour was built on blunt, seemingly serious statements, which became funny simply because of their context. I looked back over the time I had spent in Hannover and suddenly found situations that had seemed inexplicable, even offensive at the time, hilarious in retrospect. On my first night in Hannover I had gone out drinking with some young German actors. "You will notice there are no old buildings in Hannover," one of them said. "That is because you bombed them all." At the time I found this shocking and embarrassing. Now it seems like the funniest thing you could possibly say to a nervous English visitor.

Lee also recounts the following brilliant joke, apparently known among 'comedy professionals' as 'The German Child':

An English couple have a child. After the birth, medical tests reveal that the child is normal, apart from the fact that it is German. This, however, should not be a problem. There is nothing to worry about. As the child grows older, it dresses in lederhosen and has a pudding bowl haircut, but all its basic functions develop normally. It can walk, eat, sleep, read and so on, but for some reason the German child never speaks. The concerned parents take it to the doctor, who reassures them that as the German child is perfectly developed in all other areas, there is nothing to worry about and that he is sure the speech faculty will eventually blossom. Years pass. The German child enters its teens, and still it is not speaking, though in all other respects it is fully functional. The German child's mother is especially distressed by this, but attempts to conceal her sadness. One day she makes the German child, who is now 17 years old and still silent, a bowl of tomato soup, and takes it through to him in the parlour where he is listening to a wind-up gramophone record player. Soon, the German child appears in the kitchen and suddenly declares, "Mother. This soup is a little tepid." The German child's mother is astonished. "All these years," she exclaims, "we assumed you could not speak. And yet all along it appears you could. Why? Why did you never say anything before?" "Because, mother," answers the German child, "up until now, everything has been satisfactory."

Finally, anyone who says Germans are not funny has never heard of Erwin Pelzig. Of course, for most of you, the humour may pass right by, requiring, as it does, not only knowledge of German but also of the dialect spoken in Franconia, a region to which, for a variety of reasons, I feel inordinately - and quite fondly - attached. (To be honest, probably about 50% of his humour lies not in what he says but how he says it...)

Still, for some of you, perhaps worth a look...

Murder in the subjunctive

Celebrating our 100th post, and while we're on the subject of hype:

In much of the media, there really is less and less interest in the actual content of books or television programs these days. What matters is merely the sell, which increasingly means the hype. The actual product comes last in priority. With free markets comes great freedom but also some responsibility: to publish books worth publishing, to air TV shows actually worth airing, to care about content as well as ratings and sales. Those criteria are distinguishable from what the market will reward. That distinction has been lost in many places. It is not a criticism of the market; it is merely a reminder that markets also require integrity among those who work in them. That point deserves recovering.

Right on, Andrew. (Except, I would suggest, this is a criticism of the market....what else, in this case, would you be criticising?)

Shame about your publisher, though...

Land of Hype and Glory?

I have been travelling to Britain with some regularity for most of my life (I have one parent who was born and raised there and the family ties were tight), and with particular duration and frequency for the last decade or so, as a result of research and, more recently, to get to my workplace. I have also spent nearly two decades immersed in an academic effort to grapple with the country's culture and history.

I think I can fairly say that I've long been in love with the place.

Nonetheless: I'm concerned.

Precisely what concerns me is something I've had a difficult time expressing. I tried to explain it to a good friend of mine some weeks ago in London by pointing out that despite years of economic growth and loudly trumpeted 'modernisation' so much of Britain - even it's world-class capital - remains so thoroughly...'shabby', as I put it.

Of course, a kind of down-at-heel amateurishness has long been central to the charm of the UK, particularly back when it was combined with a sense that the British were incapable of taking themselves too seriously.

But, I think what I've been noting is a new and unpleasant sense of cultural superiority abroad on the island, a widespread opinion that things are vastly better (faster, richer, cooler...) in Britain than in, say, continental Europe. Which would be halfway tolerable if it weren't combined with so much selling of old beer in new bottles, if all that half-baked surface coolness was not, in the end, just so tremendously over-hyped and costly.

In retrospect, then, it was less the shabbiness as such which was bothersome and more its coexistence with a shouting, superficial version of hyper-modernity. (Britain has become, in some way, a very bling kind of place.) This - alongside a relentless decline in the quality of public life and the growing tabloid hysteria which seems to be infesting once reliable bastions of at least semi-serious culture (e.g., the broadsheets and the BBC) - has been instilling an increasing sense of discomfort when I'm there, a discomfort which engages in a constant duel with the other side of my brain which is so thoroughly fond of the place.

It's a type of cognitive dissonance.

(Perhaps I'm not alone: A recent story in Spiegel cites a survey according to which up to a quarter of Britons are considering moving abroad.)

But, of course, only a former native can really wax eloquent about the disappointments of 'home', and over at Click Opera, Momus had gone some way toward expressing what I was trying to get across to my good friend on an otherwise lovely night on the South Bank. (I think, however, the only thing I succeeded in was annoying him with my relentless negativity and opinion that many things were, actually, much better in Germany. Sorry, dude.)

Momus, who has spent considerable time living in Japan and now lives in Berlin, writes of his impressions of Birmingham on a recent trip.

Host Greg, who meets me at the airport [...] tells me that the only good food I'm likely to encounter in Brum is the bratwurst being sold at the German Christmas fair. Apparently the centre of town is full of tiny chalets selling gluhwein and sausages. On loan from Frankfurt.

When I go hunting for breakfast the next morning, I discover the truth of Greg's words. The pedestrian centre of Birmingham is full of familiar retail chains -- Boots, Habitat -- but there are no small businesses, the sort of places where cooking gets done. Everything's pre-packaged, pre-prepared, cold, slick, global. One place says "Cut sandwiches... sausage and egg?" The question mark -- and the lack of tables -- puts me off. I end up eating at a slick chain called "Eat: Real Food". They offer cold dishes in plastic boxes; sushi, feta salad, Thai noodles with cashews. I opt for the latter. It's bland beyond words. And expensive.

Noting the extent to which tabloid hysteria seems to have taken over British media (current obsession: paedophilia), he moves on to discussing - quite effectively, I think - the ways that Birmingham and the hotel in which he stays sums up much of what is unsettling about early 21st-century Britain:

So Birmingham has this contrast between soft and hard, safe zones and danger zones. Soft-and-safe is shopping, marketing, luxury, self-indulgence; chatting to your friend on your mobile phone as you walk through the Mailbox, a luxury shopping centre housing the BBC headquarters. Soft is my hotel, the slick Malmaison, which is "premium marketing-designed" in that terribly British way.

By "premium marketing-designed" I mean that graphic designers and marketers have made something over to allow it to pass as a luxury product and therefore command inflated prices. It's rebranding something upmarket not based on any really expensive new contents, but on a series of luxury signifiers. It's very British, because Britain doesn't really want to put the time and love into really improving quality of life, but it does want to hoist prices.

[...]

The room -- tastefully decorated with low-hanging orange and brown lampshades -- is full of amusing signs. Instead of "Shampoo" and "Conditioner" and "Do Not Disturb" and "Please Make Up Room", the signs say "Soft as a feather" and "Fresh as a daisy" and "I want to be alone" and "Room upside down" (printed, cleverly, upside down).

So, a few slipping glimpses of an unfamiliar town in my motherland. Each time I come back, this country seems harder, slicker -- and softer too, if you can afford the soft bits, that is; the spa, the mortgage on the "exclusive" property. In some ways the megalithic slickness of the post-industrial capitalism here makes Britain resemble Japan.... But there are big differences. It isn't just that the mobile phones people depend on so much here are still (ten years after my web-capable Nokia) unable to offer full web access, let alone video like their Japanese counterparts. It's not just that Japan has protected its small businesses, or that it retains a sense that it's worth doing things well for their own sake (rather than just marketing things as "luxuries"). Japanese citizens also have a sense of basic kindness, respect, trust and discretion towards each other.

I'm not familiar with Japan, but I think much of the above also applies in some way to Germany, even though some of the same trends affecting Britain can be (more subtly) noticed here too.

German thoroughness may not be the sexiest of national traits, but it does mean attending to substance as well as surface and function as well as form. There is much less tendency merely to rely on the ethereal hype of PR and instead to actually offer something different or better. (This is, after all, a country which still makes things rather than just selling them.) The corporatist impulse which, it is true, may not be as 'dynamic' as Anglo-Saxon neo-liberalism has meant that forms of social 'solidarity' (though seriously bashed about due to the pressures of reunification and recession) remain meaningful in mainstream politics. A commitment (fraying, but still operative) to avoiding the worst forms of social inequality and maintaining a vibrant public life has meant that the gap between the 'soft' and 'hard' life in Germany remains much less yawning.

That Spiegel story I mentioned above interviews several Britons who have immigrated to Germany, drawn by a greater sense of public safety and the ability to maintain a higher quality of life for less money.

Of course, there are problems in Germany (first among them is high unemployment and second is probably...the inability of most Germans to form orderly queues), but a recent story in the Süddeutsche Zeitung helps - admittedly anecdotally - to put them in perspective: a German sociologist reports taking a group of American colleagues to what is considered a 'bad neighbourhood' in Bremen. The Americans' response: 'How nice!'

Would the same response even be thinkable, I wonder, in the 'danger zones' of Britain?

'I'm candidate from shoulder': or, 'In winter wrestle architects will prepare plans of structures of ways.'

Last weekend, Krzysztof Kononowicz stood as the mayoral candidate of a Polish far-right party for the city of Bialystok. According to Spiegel Online, he was locally known as the 'Frankenstein of the Nationalists', who hoped to be the power behind his throne in case he had won.

He lost.

But his campaign video is very...intriguing. There are, first of all, his appearance and body language. And...then there is that sweater.

One version has been given English subtitles which add to the...poetry. Here is an edited selection of his free verse:

I have graduate trade school as driver, mechanic.

I have mother...
I have brother...
Dady is dead but dady is very...is very my deserved. He was fighting for Warsaw...he was fighting for Poland...He was fighting for god, but no father is here...he has gone. As I say he has changed place of living.

Kononowicz's main aim is to improve his derelict hometown, which, to be honest, sounds like Chicago in the 1920s:

In order to there was not bandits, theft that it was nothing.

Ours plants in Bialystock are smash. [...] So as Spomash in Strosielce.

And I want too move out police to the streets. I want to move out police.

There will not be tatter. They will be only people.

And on spring we will go out with structure. [**Yes, yes, The Wife sighs wistfully, April is the cruelest month....]

And the drivers will be to by police punished rigorously. For alcohol, cigarettes, for everything.

And it is worth to vote on me, because I'm man really honest and fair.

I will do everything. Because I'm person beliving and practicing. [In other words: I'm just a soul whose intentions are good...Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood.] And I know how to do this. How to improve ways. How everything. How to liquidate cigarettes. How to liquidate all!

Total destruction is the only solution? Ahhh...right-wing brainstorming in action is a breathtaking thing to behold.

Breaking a few eggs to make omlettes...or what?

Glad you lost, Krzysztof; but glad you didn't (yet) slide into obscurity.

It's too much fun to watch.

(A)fairy tales, fundamentalist optimism and historical progress

A.C. Grayling recently did some very fine intellectual (not to say rhetorical) work in his response to the Theos publication with the cringeworthy title 'Doing God: A Future for Faith in the Public Sphere'. There are many sparkling elements in Grayling's piece, but the most helpful ones usefully provide clear definitions for often misused words such as 'secular' and 'humanist'.

Secularism is the view that church and state (religion and national government) should be kept separate. The first secularists were medieval churchmen who did not wish the temporal power to interfere in church affairs. Temporal government of religious affairs produces emasculated and feeble latitudinarian religious bodies like the Church of England (so this, if any religious body has to exist, is a good thing), whereas religious interference or, worse, control of government has a ready tendency to degenerate into what we might revealingly call Talibanism, as history and current affairs overwhelmingly and tragically attest.

[...]

Humanism in the modern sense of the term is the view that whatever your ethical system, it derives from your best understanding of human nature and the human condition in the real world. This means that it does not, in its thinking about the good and about our responsibilities to ourselves and one another, premise putative data from astrology, fairy tales, supernaturalistic beliefs, animism, polytheism, or any other inheritances from the ages of humankind's remote and more ignorant past.

Most importantly, Grayling debunks the ever-recurring argument that a lack of faith is simply, to adapt Clausewitz, a continuation of faith by other means:

"Atheism" is a word used by religious people to refer to those who do not share their belief in the existence of supernatural entities or agencies. Presumably (as I can never tire of pointing out) believers in fairies would call those who do not share their views "a-fairyists", hence trying to keep the debate on fairy turf, as if it had some sensible content; as if there were something whose existence could be a subject of discussion worth the time.

People who do not believe in supernatural entities do not have a "faith" in "the non-existence of X" (where X is "fairies" or "goblins" or "gods"); what they have is a reliance on reason and observation, and a concomitant preparedness to accept the judgment of both on the principles and theories that premise their actions. The views they take about things are proportional to the evidence supporting them, and are always subject to change in the light of new or better evidence. "Faith" - specifically and precisely: the commitment to a belief in the absence of evidence supporting that belief, or even (to the greater merit of the believer) in the very teeth of evidence contrary to that belief - is a far different thing....

Well put, Dr. Grayling. (And from today, I would like to be counted - just so as to remove any doubt - as a committed believer in afairyism...)

However, where I think Grayling is on less firm ground is his opinion, expressed recently in Prospect, that rather than a resurgence in religious belief we are currently witnessing its 'death throes'.

The idea indeed has a nice counterintuitive quality, and there is evidence which seems to back it up.

On the other hand...I do wonder whether there's more than a touch of wishful secular thinking behind the notion of religious decline. John Gray, in a book review which appeared a few weeks ago (which I mentioned once before) expressed a view he has long - and repeatedly - been making: that secular liberal hopes for an onward march of reason and progress are indeed a 'faith' which is ungrounded in an honest appraisal of current politics, human psychology or history. As Gray puts it:

Religion - especially of the monotheistic variety that demands universal acceptance - is back. If ever politics was secular, it is so no longer. Presidents whose view of the world is formed from apocalyptic myths are in charge in Iran and the US, and seem ready to act on the belief that salvation comes to humankind by way of Armageddon. The social science that assumed religion must eventually yield to science is obsolete. If you want to understand the beliefs that are shaping global politics, read the Book of Revelation.

Maybe. But maybe not.

In any case, Grayling's comments have set off a vigorous discussion. Some of it has been very thought-provoking, some of it less so and Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels has been distributing praise and scorn where appropriate.

One highlight is her response to the somewhat floundering logic in Mark Vernon's view of the current debates around religion and secularism. Vernon says:

Consider the typical skirmish between secular and religious protagonists (AC Grayling provides a good case in point with his blog). They lead, at best, up a cul-de-sac because their arguments only go round and round in circles. They are, at worst, dangerous because in forcing people to take sides, they nurture extremes - whether religious or secular. This rides roughshod over the ground that is genuinely fascinating, humanly enriching, and socially essential: the places where science and religion reach the respective limits of their understanding and meet. The militant atheist and the fundamentalist believer alike try to rubbish such engagement because it offends their faith that science or religion can and should say it all.

To which Ophelia responds:

One, I would say Theo Hobson provides a much better case in point, and that in any case it's hard to see why Grayling provides a good case in point of both protagonists of that skirmish. Two, what places are there where science and religion reach the respective limits of their understanding and meet? And what's so fascinating and enriching about them? Unless he just means subjects on which everyone's understanding is incomplete so everyone can have a good indeterminate discussion? (But then how do discussions of that kind differ from arguments that 'only go round and round in circles'? Don't they have a good deal in common? But if so, that's not particularly a place where science and religion meet, it's just a place where humans don't know much. You can meet anyone there. Lepidopterists, mountaineers, anyone. And three (loud sigh) very few even militant atheists believe (let alone have 'faith') that science can and should say it all. I've never spoken to or read a single scientist who thinks science can and should say it all - I'd like to challenge all these enemies of militant atheism to cite one who does, with illustrative quotations. Meanwhile I'll think that's a canard, a straw man, a red herring, a magenta halibut. As is (loud sigh) the faith accusation. I wish Gordon Brown would make that illegal, if only on grounds of deep boredom.

Absolutely.

In particular, she's right about Theo Hobson's comment being a much more likely candidate for dead-endness.

Hobson starts off asserting that the 'missionary zeal' (ah, such clever - and subtle! - word-play) of assertive secularists such as Grayling reveals a 'faith dimension' in their thinking. I hope he's not saying that being insistent and consistent about something is - in itself - a form of 'faith', since that would be silly and wrong (see, for example, the quotation with which this post will end, below). But, in fact, I do think that's what he means.

He then suddenly changes direction and - accompanied by the wrenching sounds of screeching, overloaded gears and, moreover, ignoring Grayling's definition of atheism - alleges that atheism

entails a certain narrative about historical progress: we can move to a new and better age once we have dispensed with superstition. Atheism is more than the rejection of religion as false: it is the belief that religion is an evil that holds back human history. (Empahsis added)

Huh? Really? Atheism entails ('to have, impose, or require as a necessary accompaniment or consequence') a certain narrative about historical progress? All atheists have the same view of history without which atheism would be impossible?

Gosh. I'm an atheist. I'm also a historian who - like most of my colleagues - holds to a quite different narrative of history than the 'it's getting better all the time' version which Hobson imagines. Does this make me a logical impossibility? Or, perhaps not a 'true' atheist (on the 'no true Scot' model). Or perhaps I'm not a 'true' historian.

Which would be worrying...if this whole argument weren't so obviously ridiculous.

Not content with making a basic logical error, however, Hobson moves onto his quasi-historical argument that, atheism itself is the product, not as you might expect of the Enlightenment or the development of science, but rather of....protestantism.

The atheist narrative, whether Grayling likes it or not, derives from Christianity, more specifically from Protestantism. The Protestants of the 17th century believed that a new era of history was dawning. The dark age of Roman Catholic superstition was giving way to a new age of truth. This is the origin of the modern belief in historical progress. The atheist enlightenment of the 18th century inherits this historical utopianism. It is an ideology full of bastardized Protestant idealism: it believes that the post-religious truth will set humanity free at last.

Now, it's true that no idea comes from nowhere and, thus, 'derives from' something else; however, there seem to be several major intellectual steps missing between Christianity and 'the atheist narrative' (what, only one?) which Hobson decries. The Reformation was certainly an important precursor to the Enlightenment (and even after that a lot of ostensibly secularist thinking has remain influenced by religious assumptions or frameworks), but Hobson's relentless effort to detach atheism from science and link it with a blind, naive optimism about the human condition is bizarre.

I mean, at one stage in Western culture nearly all intellectual viewpoints were to some extent religious. Since modern thinking 'derives from' that tradition, it could be argued that Hobson is creating a model in which it would be impossible for anyone to have a truly non-theistic thought.
But more importantly, I have yet to actually find any prominent secular thinker who expresses the view that were we simply to get faith out of the way 'a new golden age beckons':

It [atheism] adapts the Judeo-Christian belief in the "eschaton", the glorious climax towards which history has been straining.

'Straining' towards...a 'glorious climax'. Yes. OK, I'll leave that alone...and turn instead to pointing out that Hobson's argument here relies rather heavily, and awkwardly, on the history of Positivism - which did certainly have a startlingly teleological and progressive view of history - which Gray presented in Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern.

By casting all secularists into that bizarre mould (which is a mistake which Gray himself - for all his worth as a thinker - all too often makes...while all positivists might have been atheists, the equation doesn't work equally well in the opposite direction), Hobson is confusing two very different things: the scientific, secular worldview and a very specific (though in its time influential) intellectual movement which did, at times, develop certain cult-like trappings.

But where, today, are these wildly optimistic secularists proposing that all that stands between mankind and utopia is religion? Are they the same ones also pointing to looming environmental catastrophe? The same people applying the perspectives of Darwinism to the human race, thereby emphasising its animal basis, ultimate limitations and inherent tendencies toward irrationality? The same people who realise that, even were religion to get out the way (and I don't think that even the most optimistic propose that will happen soon, if ever) fundamental conflicts rooted in economics or ethnicity would remain?

If anything, it is a skeptical, secular and scientific outlook which tends against most kinds of fundamentalist optimism. This is not to say that improvement is impossible - it most certainly is - but so, of course, is historical change in the opposite direction.

Not only is a more clear-eyed look at reality - e.g., one involving neither supernatural beings nor progressive teleologies - rarely something which leads to heartwarming sense of optimism, but such a viewpoint is essential if some kinds of desirable - if incremental and always contingent - change can be won or even contemplated. If you look around, I'd say that most of those with a secular perspective are indeed concerned about religion; but they also tend to be concerned about a lot of other things as well, and I think that most of them have no illusions about the meaning of history.

But just to show how little the accusation about a secular worldview being simply another form of faith has changed, I'll give the final word to Richard Dawkins, who in a 1997 essay 'Is Science a Religion' wrote:

I want to return now to the charge that science is just a faith. The more extreme version of that charge — and one that I often encounter as both a scientist and a rationalist — is an accusation of zealotry and bigotry in scientists themselves as great as that found in religious people. Sometimes there may be a little bit of justice in this accusation; but as zealous bigots, we scientists are mere amateurs at the game. We're content to argue with those who disagree with us. We don't kill them.

But I would want to deny even the lesser charge of purely verbal zealotry. There is a very, very important difference between feeling strongly, even passionately, about something because we have thought about and examined the evidence for it on the one hand, and feeling strongly about something because it has been internally revealed to us, or internally revealed to somebody else in history and subsequently hallowed by tradition. There's all the difference in the world between a belief that one is prepared to defend by quoting evidence and logic and a belief that is supported by nothing more than tradition, authority, or revelation.

Simple enough, wouldn't you say?

So, to religious critics of secularism, I can only say the following: for God's sake, find a new meme.



[UPDATE]: I've just noted another very worthy response to Hobson's commentary here at Fisking Central, who seem like such fine people that I've also added them to my links list.

Gameboys, cashmere and chocolate for freedom

Oh, this is interesting.

While Iraqi civilians and Iraqi and American soldiers are learning about the imposition of 'freedom' the hard way ('stuff happens' as Rummy used to say), the Guardian reports that anti-socialist Cuban exiles have found a much, much more relaxing way to promote free minds (and free markets) in their homeland.

And they're doing so at American taxpayers' expense, no less.

A congressional audit has found 'questionable expenditure' on the part of dissident groups supported by the US government.

There may be nothing new about government funds being wasted by flaky dissident groups (particularly given the track record of the groups that the US government supports...), but what I find even better than the expenses themselves are their vehement justification by the leaders of the groups in question:

The Miami-based Acción Democrática Cubana spent money on a chainsaw, Nintendo Game Boys and Sony PlayStations, mountain bikes, leather coats and Godiva chocolates, which the group says were all sent to Cuba. “These people are going hungry. They never get any chocolate there,” Juan Carlos Acosta, the group’s executive director, told the Miami Herald.**

He also defended the purchase of a chainsaw he said he needed to cut a tree that had blocked access to his office in a hurricane, and said that the leather jackets and cashmere sweaters were bought in a sale. “They [the auditors] think it’s not cold there,” Mr Acosta said. “At $30 [£16] it’s a bargain because cashmere is expensive. They were asking for sweaters.”

That is good reasoning (and, yes, cashmere is expensive), but it gets even better:

“I’ll defend that until I die,” Mr Hernandez Trujillo said of his decision to spend part of his group’s allocation on boxes of computer games. “That’s part of our job, to show the people in Cuba what they could attain if they were not under that system.”

'Until I die'? That's a strong claim, Mr. Trujillo...are you sure?

However, I suppose demonstrating to oppressed Cubans that gringo capitalism not only includes the luxury of a minimum wage of $5.15 an hour but also comes equipped with a BFG9000, is, erm, priceless. That, after all, is what democracy is all about.

Alongside...hooray!....the free market.

So enjoy those government funds, OK?

La lucha continua!


**As The Wife can't help but remark: 'Let them eat brioche!'

It's the end of the world as we know it...

...but other things are still interesting too.

Light-years away from my previous post - and on a far, far more frivolous note - Dan Kois asks which was the better band of the 1980s: R.E.M. or U2?

The answer, I think, is obvious...

Temporarily speechless

I admit, it may be that I'm somewhat too prone to contemplating the more negative side of humanity, in particular its propensity to wanton cruelty.

Maybe.

But then I read an article like this one, from today's Guardian, on the emerging evidence of the massive scale of rape in Congo's wars over the last decade. The piece's title highlights the numbers, which are horrible enough; however, the real horror lurks in the individual stories, told in paragraphs that I don't even want to repeat.

Just saying....

...not for any reason or anything.

Nominations for the 2006 Cliopatria Awards (in various categories) are now being accepted.

The eternal themepark of the creationist mind

At the Guardian, Stephen Bates reports on his tour of the first partially completed sections of The Creation Museum - motto: 'Prepare to Believe! - which is being built in Ohio. It's well worth reading, since it reveals two important aspects of creationism. First, its power. Two, its jaw-dropping stupidity.

As to the power bit, this 'museum' (which deserves the quotes since, as far as I can tell, it is not actually displaying anything factually true) will cost about $25 million, of which all but $3 million have already been raised. Aside from access to funds, there seems to be a lot of technical know-how behind it - at least with regard to animatronics if not to biology. Finally, the institution seems almost inevitably to have at its disposal the requisite few people with science degrees who wigged out somewhere along the line and decided to let Jesus into their hearts. This wouldn't be so bad in itself, though it seems that in the process he's gone and re-booted their minds as well.

Finally, as the article points out, there may be 50 million Americans who believe in literal versions of creationism. To them should be added the many more with less strident beliefs whose world view tends more toward a squishy mish-mash of half-facts, convenient fictions and lots and lots of angels.

This is, in short, a much bigger story than some strip-mall church adding a few velociraptors to their Winterval nativity scene.

Patrick Marsh, the 'museum's' designer, used to work for Universal Studios before being reborn and committing his life, apparently, to spreading a version of the Good News which seems to go something like this:

"The Bible is the only thing that gives you the full picture," he says. "Other religions don't have that [oh, Patrick, they do, they do...], and, as for scientists, so much of what they believe is pretty fuzzy about life and its origins ..."

('Pretty fuzzy' about life. Er, yes: science has really made so little progress over the past few centuries, I fully agree. And in the meantime there have been all those remarkable breakthroughs in faith healing....)

Whether Bates managed to keep a straight face during this interview is not explained; nevertheless, he gamely throws out some questions in the ultimately vain hope of getting a rational answer.

Predictably, as befits a product of fanaticism, there is nothing fuzzy about the 'museum's' view of life and its origins. The Earth, as any decent Sunday school can teach you, is about 6,000 years old (give or take a few months...) and everything was created by God as explained in Genesis.

(Some of you may wish to object that there are two different and contradictory versions of that story, but please don't be so obtuse and disrespectful...remember, 'mysterious ways' and all that...)

So, nothing 'fuzzy' about this perspective, even if there may be a need for some very soft focus camera-work in the end:

We pass the site where one day an animatronic Adam will squat beside the Tree. With this commitment to authenticity, I find myself asking what they are doing about the fig leaf. Marsh considers this gravely and replies: "He is appropriately positioned, so he can be modest. There will be a lamb or something there next to him. We are very careful about that: some of our donors are scared to death about nudity."

So: they can spend millions on a farcical delusion and make complete asses of themselves in public without batting an eyelash, but the thought of the devil's organs unwrapped scares them 'to death'. This spurs two thoughts. First, I think we may have the makings of a new and devastating weapon in the war on irrationality. Second, I am surprised that christian nudists - who are also busy building this year - have yet to protest this shameful concealment of creation's own, erm, pinnacle. I hope they'll get around to it soon enough.

Disappointingly, there is no word in the article about whether Adam and Eve will come equipped with navels.

The 'museum's' 'research scientist' is biologist - oops, sorry, astrophysicist - Dr. Jason Lisle. Dr. Lisle - who seems to have a great admiration of breathless non-sequiters such as "Amazing! God has a name for each star" and "The sun's distance from earth did not happen by chance" - appears to make an interesting - and revealing - distinction between what he knows and what he believes:

And how did he pass the exams? "I never lied, but if I was asked a question about the age of the universe, I answered from my knowledge of the topic, not my beliefs."

As I always say: never let a little knowledge stand in the way of belief.

There is, sadly, nothing new about all of this, I know. Still, it throws me into fits of hair-pulling fury that it is necessary to discuss such things.

What never ceases to amaze me is the thoroughly brazen flippancy with which creationists will refer to science. Statements along the lines as 'There is no evidence of evolution', for example, whereas, of course, there are vast libraries and museums and laboratories across the world where nearly 150 years of post-Darwinian biology are being created, reported, archived and updated.

No, just say it and it is so.

In the face of such overwhelming masses of evidence, plainly inaccurate comments (cited in the Guardian piece) by creationist nut-job Ken Ham such as 'The Bible makes sense and is overwhelmingly confirmed by observable science' or 'nothing contradicts the Bible's account of the origins' are pathetically insignificant (though no less annoying for all that).

Ham, after all, has stated: 'No apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field, including history and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record', so his alleged interest in scientific proof and, above all, his predictable and disingenuous recitation of the mantra we just want to show both sides of the story is just part of selling the pretence of a more reasonable version of creationism than actually exists.

There is nothing new under the creationist sun, of course. The 'museum' is just the latest episode in their charlatans' efforts to argue for the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs. (A very fine debunking of one of the more insistent of these claims is available here, via Talk.Origins.)

However, I think articles like the one Bates has written are useful in contradicting the (plainly loopy) argument that the primary force driving fundamentalist religion is the uncompromising and dismissive rejection by atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett or Sam Harris of faith. This view was recently given another airing in an infinitely frustrating article by Gary Wolf in Wired which essentially concludes that the arguments of 'New Atheism' just don't offer enough spiritualist brain candy, naive respect for irrationality and blood-quickening madness as he would prefer. Creationists, predictably, love this argument about 'atheist extremism'; however, as Bates's article shows, the real extremists in this story can find enough fuel for their insane little crusade in their own distorted worldviews.

This article is beginning to make inroads on the optimism I'd developed over the last few days, and despite the joys of the recent election results, I am here reminded of something Christopher Hitchens wrote not long ago.

These days I spend a good deal of my time defending my adopted country from what I have to call anti-American attitudes, many of them based on what seem to me a mixture of envy and ignorance. But, yes, I tell the BBC man when he finally calls back, there is quite a lot of argument this fall about whether or not American schoolchildren should be exposed to the ideas first promulgated by Charles Darwin in the mid-Victorian epoch. Indeed, the subject has begun to open a split in the Republican Party, as well as between it and its critics. There is a brief silence on the line.

A silence which, in the end, I can only echo.

Fair, balanced and boil-inducing

Yet another reason I'm happy to no longer actually live in America: not being confronted with television election coverage.

But someone else is not so lucky:

Last night I was reminded of two things: one, watching televised political coverage makes me break out in weeping boils. Candy “Green Tea” Crowley alone would do it, but when she’s combined with the bloviations of Bill Bennett (who was lamenting Pennsylvanians’ inability to understand the virtues of that good, good man, Rick Santorum) I find myself rolling around on the floor and tearing the upper layers of skin from my arms. And that makes the boils burst, and that just makes a mess.

The second thing (and the rest of his comments) are available here.

I had, incidentally, missed Crowley's green tea comment the first time around. It's interesting, since I'm about to fire up a nice pot of green tea myself...but I wasn't aware that this sort of thing puts me in the ranks of the cultural elite.

Which brings up another reason I'm happy to be here rather than there. Since I moved to Europe, I've become ever more confused by some populist right-wing efforts back home to cast perfectly everyday foods - brie, espresso, baguette, whole-grain bread, balsamico vinegar, good wine etc. - as some kind of effete, snobbish and anti-American conspiracy.

Do real Americans only eat hot-dogs and apple pie? Or perhaps they prefer OxyContin and methamphetamine.

Now...to the tea and some real work.

And later, perhaps, some wine and cheese.

The beginning of the end and the end of the beginning

Somebody pinch me.

After taking the House - and following Jon Tester's narrow senate victory out in Big Sky Country - it seems that the Democrats are on the verge of something really remarkable.

And, amazingly enough, the decisive tipping-point win seems likely to come from south of the Mason-Dixon (via the Washington Post)....

Webb continued to lead by approximately 7,300 votes with virtually all of Virginia's 2.3 million ballots counted Wednesday evening, and Republicans said there appeared to be little hope that glitches or math errors might uncover new GOP votes. Gillespie said Allen was "realistic," and an e-mail sent late Wednesday said the senator would make a statement "at the conclusion" of the statewide canvass of votes. The e-mail said "more details will follow from the campaign" early Thursday.

Several Republicans who are close to Allen or involved in a potential recount said privately that they doubted Allen could overcome Webb's lead, which stood at 13 times as large as George W. Bush's lead over Al Gore in Florida in 2000.

(Yes, that last figure does seem to have a certain icing-on-the-cake ring to it...no, I haven't gotten over it.)

It seems that - shy of whatever the GOP Dirty Tricks Squad can pull out of their magic bag - AP and MSNBC have already called a Webb victory.

Following their lead, Obscene Desserts now also officially declares Jim Webb the winner.

Congratulations, Senator-elect Webb.

It remains to be seen what effect all this will have. However, one immediate result of the Democratic sweep of 2006 has added further to my delight: the taking of one Donald H. Rumsfeld's scalp.

Of course, no matter how disgraceful his performance in office, how bloody his mistakes, how flippant his attitude toward death and anarchy and how ignominious his departure, he's most likely to leave government only to take up some kind of much higher-paid consulting work for a defence contractor.

Why is it almost impossible to really punish these people? (Rhetorical question. I know why.)

But lest anyone describe the Democratic victory and Rumsfeld's departure as a 'defeat for freedom' and a 'comfort to our enemies', it wasn't al-Qaida which wrote the following:

Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt.

No. That was Army Times.

So long Don. You bastard.

[UPDATE]: Rumsfeld says Iraq war "complex for people to comprehend." In response, Andrew Sullivan keeps it simple.

[FURTHER UPDATE]: At Slate, Phillip Carter chronicles Rummy's worst mistakes and some of their consequences. Thanks for the memories.

The morning after the night before

'Democrats take House.' Three words which feel....good. Very good. Better than I had thought they would. And the Senate is still possible. That would feel even better.

I want to simply enjoy that result for a while. Before the disillusionment sets in; before the Democrats again demonstrate their unerring ability to disappoint. No, right now, I just want to savour the sense of not being completely alienated from the place I come from.

These sorts of things sound hopelessly sentimental, I know. But I remind myself of what I felt like two years ago, on what turned out to be a very unpleasant early morning in the Franconian town where I was then living.

Central European Time may have meant that the results could be digested as part of an early breakfast, but in the morning darkness it was easy enough to switch over to CNN and briefly have the feeling I'd never left. Indeed, it was too easy. As my feelings went from anxious optimism (as early word of heavy turnout was confirmed and exit polls were giving Kerry Ohio and Florida) to frustrated anger between 5am and 7am, there was something increasingly preferable about following events through the German media. It was easier to face the news interpreted through the bewildered eyes of my adopted homeland, and I found a (perhaps imagined but nonetheless comforting) solidarity in the long faces and muted tones of the reporters from ARD and ZDF.

It was bad enough, way back in what seems like another era, to have to go to bed with the news of a Bush "victory" in 2000. The clear illegitimacy of that result left a bad taste, but supplied a steady, sustaining anger. It was infinitely crueller to have to absorb the blow in 2004 in the cool light of day and without the comfort of a popular majority. There is a particular pain in being robbed of the mantra that has kept many of us going over the last four years: Bush is an illegitimate president without a popular mandate. I'm going to miss this line, as it's become well worn with use in assuring people around me that Bush doesn't represent the “real” face of America. Although that is still partly true, no amount of rationalization and differentiation can soften the rude awakening of 2004.

Nonetheless, despite the sense of media-driven, globalised immediacy, America seemed a long way away. The word “mandate” has never sounded so vile, so threatening. I couldn't answer the bemused question that the weekly newspaper Die Zeit put on their cover, Warum wieder er? (Why him again?) After the collapse of all the putative reasons for invasion? After months of demonstrated incompetence? After reams of worrying, or even outright bad economic data? After three mediocre debate performances? After the disgusting – yet carefully calibrated–intolerance toward gays and lesbians? I realized that I had difficulties answering these questions for Europeans largely because I couldn't answer them satisfactorily for myself. Of course, the language of the pollsters became an easy refuge: Bush had energized his base, painted Kerry as indecisive, used the advantages of a wartime incumbency, benefited from voters' fears about terrorism, etc., etc., ad nauseam. All of this has a certain anaesthetic quality but focuses merely on the symptoms. What it can’t do is diminish the creeping sense of not understanding my own country anymore.

Yes. That was a very bad day indeed.

It is too much to expect that a single election means anything has fundamentally changed in America.

But after the relentless rightward march over the past couple of decades, I'll take what glimmers of hope (and comprehension) I'm offered.

Such victories should be celebrated.

And I sincerely hope that all my Democratic friends back home are enjoying their hangovers, which, for once, are not the legacy of drowned sorrows.

Retro Hour Retry: Five Get Over Excited

Well that was quick.

The video for Happy Hour which I presented here just last night seems to have been removed from its source (is new YouTube owner Google to blame? Enquiring conspiracy theorists want to know...), but I'd hate for you to have to leave without a dose of late 80s good times and not-so-subtle political commentary. (This time with puppets!)

So as a quick replacement...

>

Retro Hour: Happy Hour Again

The opening shot in a new series here at Obscene Desserts.

The music...of our youth (via YouTube).

Part 1: The Housemartins

I wish I was the future, I kiss you in the past

I've just discovered that one of my all-time favourite people, Robyn Hitchcock, has a MySpace page. Which is nice.

What is much better, is that if you go there you can hear some new songs by him, one of which is 'Adventure Rocket Ship'. Not one of his best songs ever...(and its imagery is a bit more chaotic than is usual)...but it is certainly well above average.

And songs about space travel really do have something...special?

Wolves in lambs' clothing?

Now, this is interesting:

"If, as most Christians accept, they should be politically involved in democratic processes, many believe this may, where necessary, take the form of active resistance to the state. This may encompass disobedience to law, civil disobedience, involving selective, non-violent resistance or, ultimately, violent revolution." (Emphasis added)

So saith (according to the Telegraph) the Evangelical Alliance UK, in their new report 'Faith and Nation'.

At their website, the EA - representing, apparently, over a million members - introduces this report as being part of a 'challenge' to Islam 'to engage in debate without resorting to intimidation'.

Hence, apparently, the completely non-intimidating reference to violent revolution.

To be fair, having followed up on the links to the 'Faith and Nation' report (the original PDF is available here), when seen in the context, the bits quoted in the Telegraph add up to less a clarion call for the forcible imposition of Biblical law (whatever that might be) and much more a kind of meandering shuffle through centuries of Christian thinking.

Additionally, from its style, it's quite clear that it was written by a committee. (And no, that is not a stylistic compliment). It weaves back and forth on topics such as resistance and violence using those famously vague phrases such as 'many think that' and 'some believe' to avoid taking any real stand.

It may be sinister. Or it may just be confused.

Of course, the headline 'Christian Group Suggests That Many Christians At Various Times in History Have Advocated Violence In Certain Circumstances But Others Have Believed Otherwise' would have hardly been the kind of thing with which you can sell newspapers.

In the end, rather than bashing you over the head with violence, it bores you to death with verbosity. You may choose to read the whole thing if you choose.

If so, may God (or Zeus or Ra or "Bob") help you.

There are some strange things about this document though... According to the EA website, for example, the 'call' is offered in a spirit of 'assertive love', which is a concept which leaves me a bit baffled, I have to say. The EA itself puts the term in quotes...so it may be that they're not sure what it means either.

It may, of course, be the sort of thing which the good Rev. Ted ('I think I know what you did last night') Haggard has allegedly (though actually somewhat-admittedly) been engaging in over in another vital centre of Christendom. In which case, I suspect that most muslims are not interested in entering into a dialogue of that sort.

It may, on the other hand, be just another of the many murmurings of a comparatively insignificant group of wackos.

However, it might, on the other other hand (what, don't you have three hands?), be the sort of thing which a distressingly large number of other evangelicals (also in God's Own Country) have been advocating with no small amount of...assertiveness.



Onward, Christian soldiers...

So long and thanks for all the fish...

Imagine the world without fish. It seems that some of us of a certain age (and many more of those who are younger) will have to face this prospect, according to a report appearing in the BBC:

Stocks have collapsed in nearly one-third of sea fisheries, and the rate of decline is accelerating.

Writing in the journal Science, the international team of researchers says fishery decline is closely tied to a broader loss of marine biodiversity.

But a greater use of protected areas could safeguard existing stocks.

"The way we use the oceans is that we hope and assume there will always be another species to exploit after we've completely gone through the last one," said research leader Boris Worm, from Dalhousie University in Canada.

"What we're highlighting is there is a finite number of stocks; we have gone through one-third, and we are going to get through the rest," he told the BBC News website.

Steve Palumbi, from Stanford University in California, one of the other scientists on the project, added: "Unless we fundamentally change the way we manage all the ocean species together, as working ecosystems, then this century is the last century of wild seafood."

Now, imagine the world without people, as this fascinating article from New Scientist suggests:

"The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better," says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. But would the footprint of humanity ever fade away completely, or have we so altered the Earth that even a million years from now a visitor would know that an industrial society once ruled the planet?

[...]

All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here.

Yet if the aliens had good enough scientific tools they could still find a few hints of our presence. For a start, the fossil record would show a mass extinction centred on the present day, including the sudden disappearance of large mammals across North America at the end of the last ice age. A little digging might also turn up intriguing signs of a long-lost intelligent civilisation, such as dense concentrations of skeletons of a large bipedal ape, clearly deliberately buried, some with gold teeth or grave goods such as jewellery.

And if the visitors chanced across one of today's landfills, they might still find fragments of glass and plastic - and maybe even paper - to bear witness to our presence. "I would virtually guarantee that there would be some," says William Rathje, an archaeologist at Stanford University in California who has excavated many landfills. "The preservation of things is really pretty amazing. We think of artefacts as being so impermanent, but in certain cases things are going to last a long time."

Ocean sediment cores will show a brief period during which massive amounts of heavy metals such as mercury were deposited, a relic of our fleeting industrial society. The same sediment band will also show a concentration of radioactive isotopes left by reactor meltdowns after our disappearance. The atmosphere will bear traces of a few gases that don't occur in nature, especially perfluorocarbons such as CF₄, which have a half-life of tens of thousands of years. Finally a brief, century-long pulse of radio waves will forever radiate out across the galaxy and beyond, proof - for anything that cares and is able to listen - that we once had something to say and a way to say it.

But these will be flimsy souvenirs, almost pathetic reminders of a civilisation that once thought itself the pinnacle of achievement. Within a few million years, erosion and possibly another ice age or two will have obliterated most of even these faint traces. If another intelligent species ever evolves on the Earth - and that is by no means certain, given how long life flourished before we came along - it may well have no inkling that we were ever here save for a few peculiar fossils and ossified relics. The humbling - and perversely comforting - reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.

'The Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.'

And so it should.

Remember: modern human beings have existed for about 100,000 years. Dinosaurs dominated the planet for more than 150 million years.

So, don't you go feeling special, now, newcomer.

It ain't easy being green

Is it just me, or is there something very confused about the following anti-green screed by Anthony Giddens?

Actually, it wasn't the green movement that alerted us to the dangers of climate change, it was scientists.

So, 'the green movement' and 'science' are two thoroughly different things, with no overlapping interests? That seems odd, with all those 'anti-science' greens promoting (highly technical as well as potentially highly profitable) technologies such as wind and solar energy and basing their calls for action on climate change, pollution and declining fish stocks on scientific study.

And, erm, nobody in 'the green movement' has contributed to the effort to warn about climate change? Really? Do 'scientific' ideas automatically filter through the rest of society without politically active interest groups to promote them?

Large sectors of the green movement actually have their origins in a quite different body of thinking. They are to be found in the writings of those hostile to modern industry, which was seen as destroying the integrity of nature - essentially a romantic, conservative reaction to industrialism.

There is something true about this...but, on the other hand, this in itself does seem to be a thoroughly conservative reaction to the more modern versions of environmental thinking, many of which have embraced technology and which seem to have become fairly mainstream (as is suggested, at the very least, here and here). If environmental issues have become popular topics for discussion, it most likely has as much to do with the activism of groups such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace as it does with the hard scientific work of agencies such as NOAA.

Furthermore, since it has been convincingly suggested that a highly significant part of climate change is a result of 'industrialism', has not the 'conservative reaction to industrialism' (however naive it might be in some ways) been contributory to recognising that danger?

This threat explains why so many greens are either hostile to science and technology, or at least ambivalent about them.

So, Giddens here subtly equates ambivalence about the results of science (which, I would suggest, is a rather reasonable and sane point of view) with hostility to science. Clever, don't you think? But it gets better:

The green movement developed around the idea of the conservation of nature in the face of the advance of human technology.

Partly true...so, yes, for example, it has focused on pointing out the perils of, say, CFCs for the ozone layer or fossil fuels for the climate.... which, in the end, has also been the focus of many scientists, who, according to Giddens seem to exist in a non-politicised cloud of ivory-tower purity...

The very imagery of "green" - a return to nature freed as far as possible from human tampering - is wrong. There can be no going back to "nature", since "nature" no longer exists, at least so far as climate is concerned - we are living in a world in which human influence is everywhere.

I'm not so sure that the vast majority of green thinking does, anymore, focus on a 'return to nature' which is straw-manned here by Giddens.

Moreover, if 'nature' no longer exists because humans have 'influenced' the world, when is it exactly that 'nature' stopped existing? Humans have 'existed' for - depending on one's view - around 100,000 years...and the first major human-caused extinctions may have been caused about 10,000 years ago. This sounds like a major 'influence'; so did 'nature' stop 'existing' way back then? If so, isn't the distinction being made here somehow silly?

There is, of course, a core insight buried somewhere in this...I too think that there is a romantic element in some green thinking which has created a kind of Frankenstein version of science which only does harm to the world. But, most of the sensible green thinking to which I pay attention (see my next post) takes this as a given.

On the other hand, most of the environmental problems with which scientists - and others - have to deal with are a result of human abilities to affect the environment which have been aided by...wait for it...science.

This all seems straightforward enough to me. And, I hope, to you.

But what I find bizarre in this comment from Giddens is his idea that a statement such as this -

Science and technology have to be a large part of our responses to climate change.

- is in any way in need of saying for the vast majority of people who would consider themselves part of the 'green movement' which he apparently so despises.

To suggest that the main obstacle to dealing with climate change in the next century is the green movement is, frankly, demented and perverse, and it is a thought more worthy of a hack novelist like Michael Crichton than an intellectual of Giddens's standing.

It really doesn't take too much originality to be a prominent thinker these days, does it?



As a PS to these thoughts, The Wife has the following to say:

Giddens opens his commentary with a statement that may seem to reflect the situation accurately, but it is nevertheless a piece of rhetorical obfuscation of the kind I usually give my undergraduate students to dissect. Climate change has not just "come to the forefront" in public discourse, it is being used, in public (which does not necessarily mean "by" the public), to achieve very specific political goals (some of which are as far removed from the ecological concerns on which they capitalise as they could be). Context, please!

I hope I'm not the only person around to find the green conscience recently sported by Blair and Cameron to curry favour with the voters a hypocritical and shameless instrumentalisation of the existential issues which green politics are addressing (and have, in some countries at least, been doing so for some decades). This is also the reason why I thought it rich, to say the least, that the political leader of a country that until a couple of weeks ago gave sod all about ecology, should urge the chancellor of Germany (clearly one of the more ecologically aware European countries and the first to elect greens to parliament) to push a common strategy on climate change.

Well-intended though Blair's intervention might have been, it had an irritatingly sanctimonious ring about it. As though he'd thought up the issue of global warming all by himself (maybe with the aid of an inspirational crystal or such).

Or as we say in German: as though it had grown on his own dungheap. Though in the case of Blair, we may have to refer instead to a Mayan mudbath.

Obscene Desserts in the news

Well, not exactly. But I have run across a couple of articles related to things I've written about recently.

First, in the Guardian, John Gray (the John Gray who teaches at the London School of Economics, not the Mars and Venus guy) has just reviewed Michael Burleigh's very intriguing-sounding book Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda. In doing so, he finds cause to make reference to the Cathars, about whom I also recently wrote while critiquing the highly questionable (OK, outright batty) idea that religion primarily brings people together.

(The review's title, 'Apocalypse Soon', also resembles another post of mine...but I'm not claiming any particular creativity there, though I am using it as an excuse to cite something from the archives.)

In fact, Gray uses the case of the Cathars - among others - to make what sounds like a fundamental criticism of Burleigh's argument:

Downplaying the role of the church in the crimes of the last century is part of a larger default in Burleigh's analysis. Medieval Christendom was hardly an oasis of peace. It was racked with savage wars and campaigns of systematic extermination that prefigure those of modern times. The crusade against the Cathars launched by Pope Innocent III at the start of the 13th century led to the deaths of around half a million people, many by mass hanging, drowning or torture. Violent millenarian movements repeatedly convulsed late-medieval and early-modern Europe. In the early 16th century, a communist New Jerusalem was established in the city of Munster in northwest Germany that had many of the features of later secular regimes, including the methodical use of terror. The extraordinary savagery of modern political religion does not come from giving up Christianity. It is a secular version of the faith-based violence that has been an integral part of Christianity throughout its history.

(Gray's own book Straw Dogs is one with which I've wrestled more than most others during the past couple of years: infuriating and depressing and thought-provoking...and, I must say, more convincing each time I read it.)

Secondly, in the New York Times, there is an article by Nicholas Wade entitled 'An Evolutionary Theory of Right and Wrong' which is well worth looking at even if it remains more or less on the surface level of this fascinating topic.

In large part, the short article focuses on the work of Harvard biologist Marc D. Hauser, particularly his new book Moral Minds.

Both atheists and people belonging to a wide range of faiths make the same moral judgments, Dr. Hauser writes, implying “that the system that unconsciously generates moral judgments is immune to religious doctrine.” Dr. Hauser argues that the moral grammar operates in much the same way as the universal grammar proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky as the innate neural machinery for language. The universal grammar is a system of rules for generating syntax and vocabulary but does not specify any particular language. That is supplied by the culture in which a child grows up.

The moral grammar too, in Dr. Hauser’s view, is a system for generating moral behavior and not a list of specific rules. It constrains human behavior so tightly that many rules are in fact the same or very similar in every society — do as you would be done by; care for children and the weak; don’t kill; avoid adultery and incest; don’t cheat, steal or lie.

But it also allows for variations, since cultures can assign different weights to the elements of the grammar’s calculations. Thus one society may ban abortion, another may see infanticide as a moral duty in certain circumstances. Or as Kipling observed, “The wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Katmandu, and the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.”

Attentive Obscene Desserts readers will recall that I discussed related topics not all that long ago, paying particular attention to contributions by Frans de Waal and Peter Singer.

Just another timely reminder - were any really necessary - that the cutting edge of today's Zeitgeist resides here in southwestern Germany.

Facing facts

Amongst all the vast verbiage and numerous reports about the seemingly inexorable slide toward chaos (and that's not my word, it comes via Central Command) in Iraq, I think the following brief passage (From the Times) is the most horrifying and depressing:

The morgue classifies victims according to their injuries; if a victim has been beheaded, he is a Shi’ite killed by Sunnis. If he has been killed by a power drill to the head, he is a Sunni murdered by Shi’ites. Most victims have been tortured. Bodies are dumped by the roadside and lie there for hours.

I, for one, read this and am at a loss for words.

Slow news day

Having recently returned from London with a fresh batch of research provides a good opportunity for presenting another instalment of in my occasional series of those interesting-but-unintended things which turn up while searching through old newspapers.

(Previous posts on this topic are available here, here and here.)

The following appeared on one of those 'In Other News' sorts of pages in the Manchester Guardian on 12 July 1928 (p. 11). There were several brief reports of events happening throughout the world. Here is a selection.

WOMEN POLICE IN GERMANY
Growing Appreciation

Cologne, Wednesday

As has from time to time been reported in the "Manchester Guardian," the value of women police is becoming more and more appreciated in Germany. Following Frankfort [sic], Cologne, and other cities, Elberfeld has now a force of women police. The first policewomen who officiated in Germany were trained in Cologne, during the time of the British occupation, under the direction of Commandant Allen.

CHICAGO "JUNGLE" WARFARE
Gunman's Poisoned Bullets

Chicago, Wednesday

Poisoned bullets are the very latest thing in Chicago gang warfare. While searching the house of a well-known gunman yesterday, the police came across a silk glove, in each finger of which was a bullet filled with poison. "The gangmen are resorting to the methods of the jungle," said a high police official after the discovery. "These bullets are worse than dum-dums."

LOVE-MAKING IN CEMETERIES
'A National Problem' in U.S.

New York, Wednesday

The prevention of flirting in cemeteries has become a national problem, according to the secretary of the Association of American Cemetery Superintendents. "Cemeteries all over the country are faced with the same question," he says. "Complaints have been received not only from New York but from Chicago, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. The other day nocturnal 'petters' (flirters) broke the locks and forced open the gates of a cemetery in Ohio. Many cemeteries have found it necessary to string electric lights over inviting nooks in consequence."

HOME-MADE WINE DANGER
Fatal Case of Wood Alcohol Poisoning

Recording a verdict of death by misadventure at an inquest yesterday on Rachel Elizabeth Burton, Gowland Place, Beckenham, the coroner (Mr. H. B. Sewell) said that death was due to coma produced by methyl alcohol poisoning due to excessive drinking of home-made wine.
The husband, a chimney sweep, said that every year his wife made quantities of dandelion and beetroot wines. Last week she made the usual amount. She seemed strange when he came home, and he advised her to leave the wine until it was in a a proper condition to use. He did not know how much of the wine she drank.
The police divisional surgeon said that death was due to wood alcohol poisoning owing to the drinking of the wine before it was ready for use. This poisoning, he said, was fairly common in the prohibition States of America.

A BISLEY INCIDENT
Marksman's Narrow Escape at Firing-Point

A competitor had the misfortune to discharge his rifle accidentally near the firing point at Bisley yesterday and as a consequence may be deprived of any prizes that he has won unless the Council of the National Rifle Association take a lenient view of the matter.
Another competitor who was on the firing point at the time of the accident stated that the rifle was lying crossways on the point, and that the bullet ploughed up the ground within a foot of himself and a number of other marksmen. "It was a very startling happening," he said, "and caused several of us to drop points."

Yes, I think an incident of that sort would be enough to cause anyone to "drop points"... Could it be that that - perhaps like the 'flirting' mentioned above - was a handy euphemism?