Sigh. Sometimes I wish I was religious. Life would be so much easier if I didn’t have to worry about justifying the things that I say with “evidence” or “reason”. It’d be brilliant to be able to shout my mouth of about anything and then just say “This is true because I believe it is true” and then raise my eyebrows, sort of raise my palms and pull a wry grin as if it were self-evident. Because I don’t do that already.
I mention this because of the recent news of the Catholic church re-admitting (recommunicated?) a bishop who is a holocaust denier. Whilst probably not the worst thing a Catholic bishop could do, it doesn’t exactly help brush away the… y’know… well known association between the Nazis and the Catholic church.
What’s most stunning is that the holocaust denier who the Pope has let back in isn’t even an ex-holocaust denier – they haven’t made him hold a press conference and say “What I ACTUALLY meant to say was…” – they’ve just let him back in.
I know that Catholic church is supposed to be pretty big on “forgiveness”, but this just makes them look really inconsistent. That’s right – a religion is being inconsistent! It took them hundreds of years to forgive Galileo for proving them wrong, and the best part of two millennia for them to forgive the entire Jewish population of the world for killing Jesus, and John Lennon was forgiven for claiming the Beatles were bigger than Jesus in four decades. By comparison. the lesser sin of denying the holocaust gets only a twenty year penalty.
There’s a staggering video on the BBC News website (seriously, give it a watch) of him denying the Holocaust in November 2008. He really doesn’t help himself by using the phrase “quote unquote ‘The Holocaust’”.
I like though how he’s clearly trying to position it as some sort intellectual disagreement. Betraying the rich history of his church, rather than saying something anti-semitic he tries to cite the evidence. “As far as I’ve understood the evidence…”. Obviously this strikes me as quite an odd thing to say, as it clearly implies that he’s somehow managed to miss all of the actual evidence, like… I don’t know… the gas chambers for a start?
Then again, I guess this is also a man who having presumably considered the “evidence” believes there is a magic psychic man in the sky who hear his thoughts and will grant wishes. And he probably wears a skirt too.
The upshot of this is that we have the following confirmed: You’ve more chance of becoming a Catholic bishop if you’re a holocaust denier than if you are a woman.
The battle raging in my mind contemplating the conflict in the Middle East is almost as intractable as the real thing. And unfortunately, just like the real thing, I’m horrendously stubborn so the chances of the components of my brain coming to a negotiated settlement are pretty much zero.
My opinions on the conflict don’t really go much further than “please stop killing each other” and “hey, lets help poor people”. Because if they didn’t go that far, then I wouldn’t really qualify as a member of humanity.
The other day, I wrote about Gaza conflict from an international relations perspective, much to the chagrin of some of my friends. For the sake of a surprising amount of editorial integrity on my part, it turns out I was slightly wrong on some of the specifics about the sit-in protest at my university: it’s not the SWP organising it, it’s some other leftist group, and they’re pushing for the marginally more realistic goal of getting the college to revoke Shimon Peres’s honorary doctorate and to send some supplies to the bombed Gaza University. For a group of people who have been no-doubt using the word “proportionality” a lot lately, I’m still not sure what the scale-of-action to probability-of-success ratio is.
What got me to thinking about this again was seeing the Gaza protests in Trafalgar Square yesterday- when I walked through the middle of them, the speaker was saying something about burning the license fee (because of this faff)- perhaps the first time the hard/far left have ever had cause to agree with the Daily Mail about something.
So maybe peace in the Middle East can be achieved after all if such disparate dogmatists can be shown to find common cause?
But anyway, I’ve been thinking further about the role of international law in the context of the Gaza war. Despite largely writing off ethics in international law in my previous blog entry, I don’t think this is entirely true (and I wouldn’t describe myself as some sort of of Morgenthau-esque classical realist, despite how I may have come across).
Ethics have been a part of international law for a while now – the most obvious example of this would be the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and questions of validity aside (at the time in 1947, the USSR, most – if not all – Muslim countries and the obviously nasty ones like apartheid South Africa didn’t sign up to it) – and the declaration has been used as a yardstick since by which to judge countries and by which to justify actions towards them and so on. You could also point to the UN convention on genocide (that I accused the Atheist Bus Campaign of breaking) for adding a similar ethical dimension to international law – in fact, it goes a step further and commits UN members to intervention in cases of genocide, breaking the previous international convention of non-intervention.
The human rights and international law arguments are the best ones I’ve heard so far as to why Israel are cunts, and I quite agree – Israel are being a bunch of cunts. They’ve bombed schools, universities, even the UN – and it’s surprising that they don’t seem to have bombed any hospitals yet considering the big red cross marking the target on them.
What I’m struggling to understand – and would love to hear a well argued response to this question – is why the plight of the Palestinians and to a lesser extent, the Israelis has become such a hot-button issue that provokes so much spitting of venom on both sides. Sure, I appreciate that it has been going on for ages, and has a depressingly intractable theistic side to the conflict, but I’m not sure why the conflict carries a seemingly disproportionate weight amongst the general public’s more secular collective conscience.
The whole point of a law is that it is a standard that is applied consistently. The laws of physics and human laws are essentially the same – whilst only one can be broken, it is the consistency that makes a “law” what it is.
If you don’t accept this axiom, then you’re implicitly accepting the point I made in the previous blog entry that international law is irrelevant, the international system has no rules governing it (it is in a state on anarchy, as so to speak), and that states are only constrained in their actions by the limits of their power and the actions of other states.
If you do accept what I am saying about consistency being the key tenet of international law, then I would re-iterate my question: Why Israel-Palestine?
Why are Israeli human rights abuses in Gaza the issue that people seem motivated to get behind? Why don’t other cases of human rights abuses get quite such a reaction? What about Hamas’ human rights record? What about Saudi Arabia’s? What about America’s? What about Britain’s?
Similarly, if we accept the Palestinians right to self-determination and back their cause, why don’t the Kurds see rallies worldwide for their cause? They’ve spent the last 80 years being persecuted and fenced in by arbitrary borders imposed by the British too. What about all of the other nationalist conflicts? Why don’t we see protests supporting Northern Cyprus, Somaliland and Scotland? Hell, what about the Tamils? After years of armed struggle and 70,000 deaths the Sri Lankan government has recently nearly totally smashed them to bits. Why the double standards?
(I’ve actually written about these double standards before, incidentally, in another polemic contextualised by the far less emotionally charged issue of Georgia. Why does no one care about South Ossetians? I’ve no idea.)
What I think is most interesting is the implications of this ethical dimension for the international system. As I’ve described above ethics, at least in terms of the rights of the individual (some may consider the violation of another state’s sovereignty unethical) are a relatively modern concern as far as international law goes, and it’s only really since the end of the Cold War that there has been any traction behind the idea of states acting for ethical – “humanitarian” – reasons.
It is similarly interesting that prior to the UN Human Rights declaration (and I’m prepared to be proven wrong on this if anyone can provide an appropriate link) international law, and international behaviour was all about maintaining order and stability in the international system.
This isn’t surprising considering that individual states want to maintain their place in the international system and not have others meddle, and I guess because the level of slaughter that the Nazis managed wasn’t even conceivable until we had the technology of the 20th century. This preference of “order” over “justice” has long been evident even in this “ethical era”, if you can call it that. The American administrations have had no qualms backing the Saudi royal family for decades, and the Obama administration will inevitably do exactly the same (sorry, utopians, I’d dearly love to say they won’t but I’ll eat my figurative hat if this isn’t true). Even on the level of the state – which has things the international system doesn’t have like a monopoly on the use of force and the ability to enforce laws – order has often been chosen over justice in order to maintain stability. For example, when apartheid ended in South Africa, they set up a ‘Truth and Reconcilliation Commission’ to essentially let off the various bastards from the apartheid government in order to maintain precious stability.
What I’m trying to get is that challenging this notion of order being the goal of international law is fraught with danger, as it opens a massive can of worms. Take, for another example, the doctrine of pre-emptive strike. Though massively discredited now, I won’t be surprised if we hear another major power (eg: Russia) “pre-emptively” disarm a perceived threat (eg: any country from it’s sphere that dare look to the west). Or an even better example that’s relevant to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict would be that of Kosovo. The west recognising Kosovo’s independence set a dangerous precedent that will act as justification for nationalist group after nationalist group for years to come. In fact, it already has been – regardless of whether it holds holds water or not, the Kosovo precedent was used to justify the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia.
To attempt to apply ethics consistently to the international system is merely going to fog things up further. State sovereignty is, unfortunately, the powerful concept that has maintained order in the international system and undermining it is opening up the international system to almost limitless ethical dilemmas. Should we (the “international community”) be invading Israel to prevent it from killing Palestinians? Should we be going into Zimbabwe to remove Mugabe? And so on – a completely unmanageable and unenforceable scenario that would cause the international system to break down entirely.
This is what makes international relations so depressing. Any attempt to apply any level of consistency to the ethical ideas that we can use to hold international actors, be they Israeli, Palestinian or otherwise, to account, is basically going to cause the entire body of international law to unravel and reveal that the international system is in a state of amoral anarchy.
And of course, though it feels ridiculous to point out, that I don’t care about the plight of individuals caught in this international relations crossfire – I have a great deal of sympathy for people in Gaza, much like I do for the people who were being waterboarded at Guantanamo Bay or the homosexuals being hanged by cranes in Iran. And yes, I’ve donated to the DEC to actually help the people affected, just as I would if it was Israel have the crap bombed out of it by the Palestinians. And at risk of sounding even more mawkish than I already do, I think that the ethics of helping people should transcend the political conflicts, and if we’re going to campaign against human rights abuses, we should recognise all of them – not just the ones that suit the political argument that we’re trying to make. I wouldn’t march under the Israeli flag, or the Palestinian flag, just as I wouldn’t march under the British flag. I think it’d make for a much more powerful statement than the wingnuts and moonbats ever could manage alone, if people, regardless of political opinions and affiliations would protest together for respect for human rights on both sides. Not that there is a chance in hell of this actually happening.
In my most utopian of dreams, I’d prefer to see a single world state with full accountability, rule of law and a monopoly on the use of force through which to enforce international law – it’s really only under these circumstances that ethics can really count. But of course, until that happens, if you’ve managed to make it through what I’ve written above, I’d hope you’d agree that the role of ethics in international politics is much more complex.
And that’s why I can’t get my head around the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
A common belief these days is that the days of student political activism are over. Students these days are too concerned about clubbing and, er, exams, right?
This was certainly my impression until this morning, anyway, when I found out that my university’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP) have taken some direct action and have started a sit-in in one of the main lecture theatres in support of the Palestinians in Gaza.
I think it’s supposed to be a clever mirror of what Israel are doing to the Palestinians. They even have a secret entrance for smuggling supplies, though rather than a tunnel, it’s a fire escape, and I’m assuming that the protesters are not shooting at university staff and using civilians as human shields.
Though I’m certainly no fan of the war in Gaza, I’m struggling to get behind the sit-in because I struggle to see how it will actually be effective.
“Mr Olmert, President Obama is on the phone and wants to speak to you”
“Tell him I’ll call back later – I’m having second thoughts about this military action because a fringe political group in a moderately well known London University have suggested that we stop!”
As I’ve previously outlined, I’m horrendously uncomfortable with the left cosying up to Hamas, and find it bewildering that any rational person can take one side or the other in this conflict. If the SWP were campaigning for “PEACE” or “HUMAN RIGHTS IN GENERAL”, I could totally get on board with their message, but by taking sides they’re being completely irrational, and are demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of how the international system actually works.
I’ve heard people label Israel a “terrorist state” today, and claim that Israel shouldn’t actually exist. Whilst the former is a great attention grabbing headline, the latter actually positions someone with that opinion as more extreme than Hamas.
Israel is not a “terrorist state”, whatever that means. Like it or not, but from Israel’s perspective, the action it is taking in Gaza is completely rational and highlights a fascinating international relations paradigm – that of the role of ethics. The one goal of a state is to survive and maintain its national security and defend its interests. Look at what’s going on from Israel’s perspective – their security is being threatened by Hamas firing rockets at them, so to protect their state, they feel obliged to respond.
Of course, as has been depressingly demonstrated, this has led to stacks of awful human rights abuses, blowing up schools and killing people – all sorts of nasty shit. But unfortunately this doesn’t matter – ethics in international relations are a relatively new invention and hotly debated by IR scholars – but in the end don’t really enter into calculations of national security. (I could write thousands of words on this to justify this point, but I won’t bore you.)
Why is the state so important? Because it gives legitimacy. If a group, be it an ethnic group, a national group or whatever have a state – a homeland – they get all of the trappings that come with such an honour: recognition, legitimacy, and most importantly, it makes it essentially illegal for other states to meddle in the affairs of the group under established international law dating back the 17th century and the peace at Westphalia. Its one of the reasons the Jews were given a homeland after that whole “centuries of persecution culminating in the holocaust” thing. It’s why persecuted groups in other countries are so keen to get a state of their own – groups like the Kurds, the Chechens… and the Palestinians. So Israel’s desire to hang on to its statehood is entirely reasonable – they just happen to be wankers about it.
It’s international law which leads me to conclude that people who suggest Israel should cease to exist are idiots. Not because I’ve any great desire to fulfill prophecy and have a Jewish homeland that Christ can return to like it says in revelations, but because to condemn the existence of Israel is to basically condemn the existence of every single other country.
To cut a long story short, there is no written book of international law – there is no great overseeing arbiter of the international system who governs relations – international law is predicated entirely on a set of norms and precedents, and to try and justify the existence of a state is stupid. States an inherrently silly construct – but we’ve decided that’s how best to organise the international system, so we’re stuck with them. If the “logic” that Israel shouldn’t be allowed to exist because it’s only a relatively new creation, then really we may as well be arguing that the whole Meditteranean basin and most of Europe is ceded back to Rome, as it used to be part of the Roman Empire.
The international system works on the basis of “Look who’s here… now get over it”, and these are the circumstances in which settlements should be negotiated. The only real difference between the establishment of America and the establishment of Israel is that we probably have video footage of the latter.
Basically my reaction to people vehemently taking either side in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is, to borrow Ben Goldacre’s catchphrase, “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that”.
Things I might expand on in the future/if challenged
Human rights in the context of the international system
The legitimacy of the state in a post-globalisation world
Why I’m writing about moderately academic topics on my silly blog rather than in essays for university
I feel so conflicted. Against my better judgement, I’ve got into watching the latest series of 24. I just can’t help it – it’s so damn compulsive. Sure, it jumped the shark several series ago and the story lines are pretty much a case of ticking boxes that you’ll be well aware of after watching a couple of series (Jack goes rogue? Check. There’s a mole in the government? Check)… but once you start, you just can’t stop watching.
Thankfully though, it’s only fiction – no one would really think that its appropriate for a federal agent to suffocate a suspect with a plastic bag, right? It’s not like Fox News would ever cite 24 as justification for advocating torture, surely?
Oh.
What amazes me is how it blurs the lines between fact and fiction. Does this open the door for citing The Dark Knight and the threat the Joker poses as a reason to keep close surveillance on all citizens? Or are the risks posed by Jumanji enough to justify banning board games and/or Robin Williams?
Thankfully, he’s not entirely crackers – in the linked article is he agrees that creationism is a unscientific nonsense, or a “crock of shit” to use the scientific jargon, but he does still display the sort of spectacular cognitive dissonance required to be a moderate theist – say what you will about fundamentalists, but at least they’re relatively consistent.
He said of creationism that it “is the fruit of a fundamentalist approach to scripture, ignoring scholarship and critical learning, and confusing different understandings of truth” and that “The argument for intelligent design may have some appeal for many Christians but is ultimately a negation of what science is about, which is to make a hypotheses from what is observable and then conduct experiments in a constant process of testing.”
What I always find to be remarkable about these moderates is the pick and choose nature of this – Carey rejects Genesis, but presumably (and you’d imagine so considering that he’s a former Archbishop) believes in Jesus and all of the miracles and all that. Why can’t he apply that same level of scholarship and critical learning to a man who can allegedly defy the laws of physics and perform some impressive party tricks? Even if the “But Jesus is New Testament! The old testament is all rubbish now” defence or even the “The Bible is full of allegory” line, it doesn’t really explain why Carey really doesn’t like the gays, which as I understand it are only mentioned in the old testament, in fairly ambiguous terms.
Of course, he also stuck it to Dawkins and Hitchens and the like, slagging them by saying that “The attacks on the World Trade Centre, Pentagon and the White House woke us all up to a resurgent and militant Islam which remains an active presence seven years on. For some writers, such events are illustrations of the evils of religion – all religions.”
9/11 was a damn good example of religious lunacy – he’s got that right, and also rightly implies that 9/11 woke up a lot of people to what religion can do – but is displaying that amazing cognitive dissonance yet again if he’s implying that it was a freak occurrence. I’m tempted to upload my dissertation on the role of religion in shaping the international system to offer a drop from the ocean of counter-examples. But lets face it, we already know most of them.
Apparently this is taken from a lecture to the University of Gloucester, where Carey remarked that 9/11 is the “date that symbolises a growing split between faith and reason”. I didn’t realise that faith and reason were ever close friends.
Today’s Daily Express front-page is screaming “EU WILL GRAB BRITAIN’S GAS” – and as you might expect, what with this being the Daily Express they’ve got it wrong again.
The story concerns an apparent clause in the Lisbon treaty that would apparently share Britain’s gas supplies with other EU states in times when supply is compromised, such as in the current situation of Russia turning off the taps to the Ukraine (and thus the rest of eastern Europe). Of course, The Express being The Express, are completely misrepresenting the issue at stake here: that of energy security.
The report contains quotes from a Tory MEP and UKIP’s crackpot leader Nigel Farage saying that Britain shouldn’t share its supplies with the rest of Europe – apparently the Conservative party will “resist any moves towards EU common energy resources”. This is unbelievably short-sighted. It’s all well and good wanting to hang on to the gas you’ve got – but that’s no good if you’ve got none in the first place.
In 2004 the UK became a net-importer of energy (ie: oil and gas) – I can’t find an exact figure for gas alone but this 2004 report speculated that it would happen in 2006, so it’s safe to say we’re probably a net importer by now, or at least will be very, very soon. This means that the gas and oil we need is going to have to come from somewhere else. And this issue of energy security is linked to a bigger issue: security.
Unfortunately for us, that somewhere else where the gas is is quite likely going to be Russia, the non-Israeli bastards of the moment - one of the biggest potential security threats to Britain and the rest of the EU. “Resurgent Russia” or not, Russia is a powerful country so obviously figures heavily into any calculations on national security. The question is simple: Russia has what we want, how can we sustain our supply of it?
Russia need to be tamed if we want to keep the lovely, lovely gas flowing, and the only way this is going to happen is through further Europeanisation of energy security. It’s very easy to demonise BRUSSELS for stealing our energy, but the only thing that is going to give us and the other EU member states any clout when talking energy with Russia is by working together.
Russia currently has the upper-hand in the energy dispute because it follows a strategy of divide and rule- quite sensibly from it’s perspective, it won’t talk to the EU as a whole (something the Express would presumably applaud), but instead prefers to deal with individual member-states, and in effect, is playing them off of each other. Obviously due to factors such as geography and infrastructure, certain states are more dependent on imports than others – Denmark is self-sufficient, for instance, whereas Germany have what in EU-speak is called an Energy Dependence Rate (EDR) of 64.6%, making them a big net-importer, with a big chunk of that energy coming from Russia.
This plays into why the EU is so ineffective dealing with Russia – each country has a different relationship with it, which Russia can exploit. Look at the Georgia war last year on which the EU was utterly conflicted – Britain slagged off the stunningly disproportionate Russian response pretty hard, whereas Germany was much quieter on the issue. I wonder if this had anything to do with Russia being a major supplier of German energy and not being afraid to turn off the taps? (See: Ukraine 2006 – the Germans certainly did.)
The Germany/Russia energy relationship is bilateral. This is important when you consider the physical infrastructure for the transmission of gas. There’s currently talk of building the Nord Stream pipeline from Russia to Germany (and then on through northern Europe) that will go through the Baltic sea rather than any of the intervening former-Eastern bloc countries. There’s plans for a similar pipeline in the Mediterranean. What this will allow Russia to do is threaten to cut off gas supplies to Poland and the Ukraine and the like unless they get their own way (“Don’t put those NATO missiles on your territory!”, “Stop looking to the west!”, etc), without compromising western European energy supplies. And this is an obvious threat to the integrity of the European Union and will threaten any pooled European counterweight to Russian power.
If the EU wants to protect its interests and stand up to Russia more effectively than the current strategy of “not standing up to Russia” allows, then the strategy must be to further integrate the EU energy market. More physical infrastructure is needed and political changes are needed to assure that Russia must deal with the EU as one and not individual countries.
If the EU has a single energy market, it will be physically impossible for Russia to hold any country to ransom like it has been doing in Eastern Europe (think of it like a parallel electrical circuit compared to a serial one) – and it’ll be a cold day in hell, or a warm day in Siberia before Russia cut off all of the EU’s supplies. Why? The relationship is symbiotic: The EU members combined are Russia’s biggest customer – more than 50% of Russia’s GDP is oil and gas revenues, and more than half of the federal budget is from money oil and gas has brought in.
And everyone knows that money talks – it’s hard to mount a disproportionate response to an attack in the caucuses if you can’t afford the tanks to do so, so Russia needs Europe. But the Express needs to learn that it doesn’t need Europe individually.
James O’Malley is a blogger and should currently be writing an essay on energy security and the EU-Russia relationship, but is blogging instead.
2009 hasn’t got off to a great start – there’s a great stench of blood on it its hands. People are dying. Not just in Gaza, or in Afghanistan, or even in a way that the media can tenuously link to the credit crunch, but people are dying of the worst thing of all: old age.
All this death is bad news, because it puts Morris Dancing under threat. The Morris Ring, who appear to be essentially the equivalent of FIFA but with added bells and whistles have earned themselves some press this last week by being brutally honest and saying that all of the old Morris dancers are dying off and young people aren’t replacing them because dressing up with ribbons and bells, and spending hours at a time banging sticks together with beardy men in the village hall is seen as “embarrassing”. I can’t possibly imagine why.
Apparently the worry is that in 20 years time, Morris dancing will be “extinct”, and for some reason, this is a bad thing.
“This is a serious situation”, a spokesman said whilst not noticing all of the war and conflict in the world. “Once we’ve lost this part of our culture it will be almost impossible to revive it.”, he continued, inadvertently articulating what I’m hoping for.
I’m sorry for my lack of sympathy towards the Morris dancers plight, but when I see Morris dancers, I tend to thank the corporations for the fruits of globalisation for marginalising British traditions like this. As a young person who grew up in the late 80s and 90s, and indeed this decade to some extent, I’m glad I’ve had a diet of American cultural imperialism rather than the unpleasant choice I assume my dad got, between either dancing with bells and sticks, or around the May Pole.
When I hear the alarm bells jingling and look at the current Morris crisis though, all I see is textbook Darwinian natural selection: by dancing around dressed as mental patients the participants are putting themselves at an evolutionary disadvantage by severely reducing their chances of propagating their genes to a new generation. This has clearly already happened as young people today no longer have the gene that blocks out any sense of shame.
Maybe there is a way out for them though. After all, this is space-year 2009, and we’ve developed all sorts of amazing genetically engineered and mind-altering technologies. Surely there’s some sort of technology we can use to keep the tradition of Morris dancing alive for reasons that may become clear some day? I think I know the solution:
Booze.
If there’s one thing young people love, it’s getting smashed in nightclubs and (here’s the key bit) dancing. All the Morris Ring need to do is have a little rebranding exercise. Take Morris Dancing out of the village fetes and instead host it in inner-city clubs. Replace the bells with glow-sticks and the twee accordion farts with hardcore trance and the orange juice refreshments with a licensed bar, and before you know it young people will flock to it.
Then again, maybe it’s sometimes better to just let some things die?
If Rage Against the Machine have taught me anything, it is that it’s moderately important to “know your enemy”, in order for you to know who you’re raging against. Which is why last week I went to the chapel, which was basically a mini-church in my uni. Stained-glass windows, candles, the works. I wasn’t there for a church service or to actively rage against it, but for a lecture on ‘natural theology’, by Alister McGrath, the former Oxford professor who wrote ‘The Dawkins Delusion‘, who now, inexplicably, is a respected professor at my university.
Now, I got used to my friends making fun of my old undergraduate university, and claiming that it’s a Mickey Mouse university, because it’s a former-polytechnic, but I’m starting to wonder if in fact the university I’m at now is more like Acme Looneyversity. Not only does it have a Chapel as one of it’s central features, but it has an entire theology department – which is at least a magnitude less-valid a subject than, say, fashion design, which my old uni was one of the leading places for.
So I decided to go along to this public lecture Alister McGrath was hosting in the Chapel, in order to challenge my opinions. I’d only be a good disciple of Dawkins, and advocate of reason and evidence, if my scientific worldview could stand up to the challenge.
As luck would have it, rather than have an epiphany and have to repent on slagging off religion a lot, it turns out that my opinions are still correct and accurate. It turns out ‘natural theology’ is bollocks. And I don’t mean that in an anti-intellectual way, and I really don’t intend to write-off an entire branch of academia, but assuming that the lecture I saw was representative of the subject at large, it really doesn’t seem like it should be allowed to be something a serious place of learning should allow to go on.
Natural theology is presented as pretty much an alternative to the scientific method. The idea is that rather than us drawing conclusions about the nature of existence based on the shared experience of verifiable, observable evidence, is that you fill in the blanks yourself (usually with “God did it”) then look for something to support it. In other words, basically doing exactly what the creationists do. McGrath said that he tried to present in as theologically-neutral terms as possible, but this was undermined slightly that the lecture was being held in a fucking chapel.
Apparently taking the “Christian perspective” can help “understand” things. A couple of direct quotes from the slides were: “Capacity of nature to point to the kingdom [of God] when it is rightly interpreted” (my emphasis) and “nature has to be seen in a certain way if it is to be properly understood”… is pretty much the antithesis of what academia is all about. You’re supposed to study things first, then use what you’ve learnt to figure out what’s going on – not the other way around. I admit, things being the other way around would be useful for me though – I wouldn’t have to read some books before writing the 15,000 word dissertation I’ve got to do this year.
To give an example of the “natural theology” approach, it was presented as the bastard-child of the arts and the sciences (a bit like geography if geographers drew maps before checking them against the shape of the land). One peace of “evidence” was talking about the nature of beauty, and an excerpt from a poem about how nice some hills looked or something was shown as if to say “pretty nice hills… you’d need God or you can’t appreciate them”. No time was given to any alternative explanations for the nature of beauty, of course, such as how a human perception of beauty correlates with what someone who is healthy looks like, and that can be explained in terms of natural selection.
What was truly startling though was that once you strip away the already slim on the ground substance, you’re left with literally nothing – I honestly came away from the 90 minute lecture having felt that I learned nothing. It was all very poetic and wordy, and so on, but it was more akin to listening to some nerds who like Lord of the Rings discuss their own fan-fiction continuity ideas rather than anything more academic.
I bet it’s quite easy to do for a job though as there’s no real studying involved.
For the past week I’ve been a junkie for the Democratic National Convention. I’ve watched a scarily large amount of coverage, and not just what the news channels have been saying, but uninterrupted stuff on C-Span and the CNN website. Even I’m slightly unnerved by how many nobodies in the Democratic party that I can name. I even stayed up until 4am last night to watch the big Obama speech.
It was a fantastic spectacle, as the thing that I took away from it was basically “McCain is fucked”, and it was nice to see Obama lay down some substance rather than some vague hope-y platitudes. It’s pretty clear that the big take-away talking-point message from the convention, not least because it was mentioned by every single speakerfor the past four days, is that McCain is “more of the same”.
What I thought was frustrating though was that before anyone in any speech over the last week launched another excellent attack on McCain, they all felt the need to qualify it by saying something nice about McCain’s military service. I mean, I find any praise aimed at armed forces of any nature uncomfortable as it is, but doing this is perpetuating quite a major falsehood: I mean, why is McCain a “war hero” and how the hell does this qualify him for President?
In America, bewilderingly, it’s practically a taboo to criticise the military, but McCain is surely far from a great soldier. I mean, he got captured and held prisoner for five years. And you can’t be a very good soldier if you get captured. I don’t want to blow this out of proportion, but I think if you’re a soldier, you probably have two things you need to do in order to not be a crap soldier:
Not get killed
Not get captured
This probably sounds pretty callous, as McCain was captured for five years… but I’m not the first person to point at McCain’s military career and politicise it – McCain himself did that. One of the key topics he talks about all the bloody time is the fact that he went to Vietnam, as if it makes him untouchable. Tonnes of his commercials show pictures of him in his uniform or whatever – usually followed by the non-sequiteur about McCain having more “foreign policy experience” than Obama because of this. If this argument is to be believed, presumably McCain spent his five years in the so-called “Hanoi Hilton” not only being locked up and out of action, but studying for a masters degree in International Relations at Hanoi Polytechnic.
The “experience” argument is arrant bullshit anyway. Who’s really going to turn around American foreign policy? Individuals matter in politics – you only have to look at the influence Putin himself has, or how Blair and Bush were practically freedom-kissing each other in the build up to the Iraq war to see how personal relationships can affect world affairs. Who’s going to be better? The guy with a long history of being close to the awful Bush administration, who has routinely backed a militaristic and imperial foreign policy, or the new, likeable, inspirational guy who has none of the past associations who can build relationships afresh with America’s adversaries? How on earth is letting a guy who “talks tough” and takes a soldier’s hawkish worldview going to make the rest of the world act favourably towards America? If Iraq has illustrated anything, it’s that the blinkered black and white worldview where sending in the tanks solves everything is the complete anthesis to solving the complex, nuanced dilemmas in international relations. Sure, sometimes you might have to talk to dictators, murderers and wankers, but pragmatically, that’s the only way results can be achieved.
But no, McCain is a soldier, therefore his politics must be respected, even though the skills involved in being a soldier are completely different to being a President. I’d say it’s fairly unlikely – I’d say a conservative estimate would put the odds at 90% against – that the Joint Chiefs of staff will ever rush into the Oval Office, throw a machine gun into the arms of the President and ask him to provide some covering fire during a fierce battle in Sadr City. Even if this did happen, McCain would only either have a heart attack whilst running along or get captured again.
Hell, even if aliens invade á la Independence Day, I doubt McCain’s Air Force experience would be much help if he had to go up in a plane to fight the aliens, as last time he was in charge of a plane he ended up getting shot down.
If you were to look at a list of ideal requirements for being a soldier: able to blindly following orders, specific technical knowledge on how to operate weaponry and so on, these skills are almost the exact opposite to a President – you need to make decisions, and the most difficult piece of technology you’re going to come up against is a red button or a 3am telephone call.
And besides, isn’t the “McCain is better at foreign policy” argument undermined at all by the fact that the upcoming election is basically “The Republicans versus The Democrats and the Rest of the World”?
I’m not one to moan, but I think I’d be fairly justified in saying that I’ve had a pretty bad week. Right now, for instance, I should be rocking out to Rage Against the Machine at Reading, but my tickets never materialised, and for the past few days I’ve had a bloody awful stomach bug, which meant I’ve spent a couple of days in agony as my stomach decided to make the metaphorical “pain in the arse” debacle that was my Reading tickets fuck-up almost literal (it was more of a horrible pain in the stomach).
But now to top things off, for reasons I forget, I’ve discovered that one of my favourite celebrities, Adam Hart-Davis, is related to one of my least favourite people: David Cameron. Yeah, I needed to take a moment to let that sink in too. It turns out that, according to the ever-reliable Wikipedia anyway, that they’re second cousins once-removed.
This has somewhat tainted my preconceptions about how cool AHD is. I’d previously assumed that when he went into the polling booth, Adam (we’re on first name terms despite having never met) would obviously vote for the greater good, and do his democratic duty of voting for whoever keeps the Tories out. But now I know this new information, what’s to say his tribal loyalties don’t kick in? It’s pretty natural to vote for friends and family in things where voting is involved – it’s pretty much the done thing. Does this mean that AHD is voting for the Tories?
It would all make a depressing amount of sense: they both went to Eton and both have “riding bikes” as a sort-of quirky, eccentric trait. And Cameron used to be a director at Carlton Communications, one of the constituent companies that made up ITV… who later commissioned AHD’s (inexplicably excellent for ITV) How London Was Built.
I can only hope that AHD and David Cameron aren’t the best of friends. Perhaps AHD could be like the embarassing cousin? At family functions whenever Adam arrives, Dave winces and thinks “Oh god, not him again… what’s he wearing this time? Who thought the bright yellow shirt and shorts were a good idea? I hope he doesn’t show me up by enthusising about his love of science and history…”
C’mon Adam, betray your genetic make-up and don’t be a Tory, please! Ask your partner (leading psychologist and pioneer of memetics, Susan Blackmore) if she can introduce you to altruistic memes like social conscience and helping the poor!
Today’s Daily Express front-page is screaming “