RosieBell

A well ordered heaven

A review of Freedom for Sale: How We Made Money and Lost Our Liberty by John Kampfner here.

Many, perhaps most, advanced societies today, Kampfner argues, operate on the basis of a “pact,” an implicit bargain between government and society. In exchange for consumer goods and private freedoms – to travel; to marry whomever, live wherever, and read whatever they wish; to do business without interference from government regulations or labour unions; and to pay few or no taxes – the rich and the middle class have agreed to abdicate politics. The government keeps opposition parties, the mass media, and academic or journalistic muckrakers on a very short leash. Surveillance waxes; civil liberties wane. Transparency, accountability, and citizen initiative are sacrificed to order, security and prosperity.

Kampfner begins in Singapore, the prototype and showcase of this new authoritarian democracy. The tiny city-state has an extraordinarily high per capita income, without the pockets of destitution that disfigure the US and UK and without those countries’ inequitable and underfunded education, pension and health care systems. Government agencies are efficient and honest; violent crime and business fraud are rare. Travel is unhindered; technical and managerial innovations are welcomed; shopping is world-class. Streets and public buildings are clean as a whistle and neat as a pin. Just a month ago, the popular website New Geography placed Singapore at the top of its list of “The World’s Smartest Cities”.

There is, naturally, a large “on the other hand.” Nothing is allowed that the government fears might threaten public order or social stability; and the government’s sensitivities on this score are very delicate indeed. Spitting, chewing gum, yelling, or failing to flush a toilet in a public place; overstaying your visa; depicting (never mind engaging in) certain sexual acts; rashly employing irony or sarcasm; and, most important, criticising the government in ways the government deems not constructive – all these are swiftly and severely punished. Petty offenders are fined or caned; overzealous opposition politicians or trade unionists tend to be imprisoned for long stretches. Indiscreet newspapers or blogs are served with defamation suits. The local media is almost entirely under the control of state-owned companies, and even international publications like the Economist and the Far Eastern Economic Review watch their steps very carefully to avoid being charged in court. As Kampfner observes, Singapore “requires an almost complete abrogation of freedom of expression in return for a very good material life.”

Singapore is evidently where good Daily Mail readers go to when they die.  Just substitute “Daily Mail” for “government” in the bold text, and it would be heaven for the Daily Mail editors and columnists, as long as they could still get pictures of drunk, fat or sexually loose women from less disciplined places to moralise over.

When the world was grey

The recent death of Edward Woodward brought back to mind the swinging light bulb of Callan.

In the late sixties/early seventies Britain made downbeat telly programmes with stories of corruption and seediness, visual Graham Greeneland minus the Catholicism.  We saw them in New Zealand years after they were made.  We were always way behind.  Pallid immigrants from Britain would arrive with news of what was going to happen in Coronation Street.  These programmes of greyness and griminess contrasted with the brash, action-filled American shows and their abnormally good-looking actors.  I can't remember when we got a colour telly, but the colours of the British shows were so subdued anyway compared to the bright American shows that they may as well have been in monochrome.

Villains was another series of that era with the same kind of atmosphere.  Does anyone remember it? Google hardly seems to have heard of it.

There was also Law and Order – not the American show, but a short series about crooked cops and dodgy solicitors. The American show makes it difficult to find it on Google but I bet it was made about then as well.

The Sweeney came along a little later.  The final rolling credits over the mournful theme tune and the moral ambiguity make it look like son of Callan.
 

Oh Rose thou art sick

I know sod all about global warming.  I can’t do science and I don’t understand the statements of climatologists.  I read people who I think are clever and know a lot, and as they believe that global warming is man-made (please drop this “Anthopogenic”) I go along with it as well.  With this kind of thing, most of us have to find an authority of some kind.

I have noticed that in general it has got warmer and wetter in Edinburgh, and plants grow out of season.  What’s this rose doing blooming in mid December? 

My friend in New Zealand tells me how the frosts in the Waikato that we experienced when we were children no longer happen. However, spasmodic local observations don’t mean much.

Here are a couple of entries from The English Year, compiled by Geoffrey Grigson:-

December 13 1775

Ice bears: boys slide.

Gilbert White, Hampshire

December 14 1774

Dark and mild, spitting rain, great rain.  Earthworms are alert, and throw up their casts this mild weather.

Gilbert White, Hampshire

I’ve always led a green existence anyway, cycling and recycling, buying clothes second-hand, gardening and composting, so none of the present exhortations to save the planet makes any difference to how I live. 

Vox populi, vox doh

When the referendum in Switzerland banning the construction of minarets was hot news the blogosphere was full of cheers and boos. Two cheers that I noticed came from:-

• libertarians who were crying a victory for democracy and liberty (this here explains the difference between those two political abstractions and how they can come into conflict); and
• blog commenters who spend much of their time denouncing Iran or Saudi Arabia who were now saying, "This is Switzerland’s business. Who are we to criticise?"

So plenty of people approved a ban that was grossly illiberal and scary too, since the referendum was organised by the far right Swiss People’s Party. But this Swiss guy sounds like an honourable liberal acting in a way John Stuart Mill would have approved.

"A Swiss shoe-shop owner has built a mock minaret on the top of his warehouse in defiance of a ban on the Muslim architecture.

Guillaume Morand extended a chimney, gave it the form of a minaret and sprayed it in gold paint to protest against a constitutional amendment approved in a nationwide referendum last month.

“It was scandalous that the Swiss voted for the ban,” said Mr Morand, 46, who owns the Pomp It Up chain of shoe stores. “Now we [the Swiss] have the support of all the far-right parties across Europe. This is shameful.”"

Good for him. I’ll buy a pair of shoes from one of his stores if I ever get the chance. But could any libertarian who gave this ban the thumbs up please imagine yourself as a gladiator and the crowd in unison giving the thumbs down as to whether you should live or die. Your liberty would be severely compromised, however democratic the decision. Also, note this:-

“Our minaret is pretty,” he said. “You could say I’m proud of it and I’m happy that people are talking about it.” His neighbours are less enthusiastic and have showered him with racist insults since the minaret appeared this week, he said.

Another bunch were defending the ban on aesthetic grounds i.e. the Swiss didn't want alien structures spoiling the look of their cities, or on feminist grounds, because Islam = female oppression. Mr Morand, though, hasn't been abused for building something ugly, out of keeping or representing religious patriarchy and the misogyny in Abrahamic religions. A chunk at least of those voting saw minarets=Islam=religion of a foreign minority, and that is what they were taking exception to. Xenophobia isn't necessarily a vote winner, but it has had popular support in the past to a murderous degree, and it is the reason for existence for a fair amount of political groups in Europe who are active at the moment.

Fog

Orwell described today’s weather seventy years ago:-

Raw, chilly, thick mist most of the day.

Fog isn’t that common in Edinburgh, and it felt strange and a little scary cycling to work.  The sound of traffic was muffled and invisible in the background, and then I would see the lights looming large just behind me and the noise of each car or motorbike amplified.

More Pedantry

I couldn't remember my password so clicked the link which said Forgotten password?  I got this reply:-

Your email should be arriving momentarily.

Software designer - momentarily does not mean "in a minute" or "shortly".  What you've said is that my email will appear for a few moments and then disappear again, like that bloke with a knife in the Hallowe'en series of films.  Actually if you had said "in a minute" or "shortly" you'd have been wrong as it took 15 minutes or so - a long time in computer-waiting time - and by then I'd clicked my forgotten password link repeatedly until another message told me I should stop.

Prejudice Supported and Confounded

Evolutionary psychology always sounds like great fun, a kind of parlour game or perhaps one for the dining room where men sit over port saying, “The ladies, God bless them,” while in the drawing room the women are saying, “Oh men! Useless!”   However it's a game you can play in a university as an academic career.

So research that is to be published in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology says that men and women shouldn’t shop together as men approach it as hunting, while women approach it as gathering. 

women would spend hours trying to find the right outfit, present or object, because they had in the past spent ages trying to find the best quality and health giving foods.

Men on the other hand, decided in advance what animal they wanted to kill and then went looking for it. Once it was found - and killed - they returned home.

Now, I would say that when I’m in Monsoon I view the poor blokes fidgetting on stools waiting for the Missus trying on tops as having an air of recent emasculation.  And I do remember living with a guy who would go to the supermarket and return to lay the full shopping bags at my feet, like a cat bringing in a mouse.  He could shop, but he couldn’t put away the goods he had bought, whereas I had mastered the art of putting groceries into plastics bags, coming home and then deploying them into cupboards and the refrigerator.

(No doubt the little gatherer  back at the den had to (a) exclaim it was the finest mammoth she had ever seen and (b) find somewhere to put the oversized inedible piece of toughness, whispering to her female coevals “Hunters!  Useless, aren’t they!”)  

But I tell this Professor Daniel Kruger of the University of Michigan who heads this research project that when I shop for clothes I know exactly the colour and style I want, go to two shops which won’t have what’s in my mind, and return home cross and put out.  Also, he evidently has never accompanied music loving blokes to a record shop.   They’ll browse there like picky wildebeests for what seems like a whole dry season.  

Bedworthy=Sick

Email exchange:-

1st person:-  I’m sorry I couldn’t get back to you.  I’ve been off sick.  There’s a nasty bug going round.

2nd person:- That’s all right. I was bedded for a full week myself so I know what you're saying.

Has “bedded” come to mean “in bed” rather than “taken to bed for sexual purposes?”  So will “bedworthy” (which I haven’t seen in any recent writing and have never heard in speech) come to mean “fit for bed”, i.e. unwell.  If “bedded” goes that way it would mean losing the little rhyme “wedded and bedded” (from the days when that was supposed to be the actual sequence of events).

Mastering English

From a review of the film A Serious Man:-

Perhaps the most masterful thing the Coen brothers achieved in this film was to slip so much death into it without anybody noticing – a bit like life.

From a blurb about a book on roses:-

This masterful work is the definitive grower's guide to the buying, planting, propagation, feeding and pruning of the important Hybrids, Shrub Roses and Climbers.

From Current English Usage:- (not so current now, 1962)

Incorrect.  Masterly is required.  Masterful means ‘assertive, strong-willed, determined to be a master,.  Masterly means “skilful”, in the manner of one who is a master of his craft.”

I wonder if the difference between the words will be sustained or will they go the way of “uninterested” and “disinterested”.  I can see masterly disappearing and masterful coming to mean both assertive, “a masterful man” and skilful, “a masterful performance.”

Current English Usage like all good reference books is a lively read for aficionados, with sensible advice on grammar, punctuation and vocabulary.  I also enjoy Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English, which is both prescriptive and entertaining.   It’s out in a new edition.

the book surely is a well-preserved “monument to all that was linguistically acceptable in the standard English of the southern counties of England in the first quarter of the twentieth century.” But it’s much more than that, of course. More than a million copies of Fowler’s have been sold; it is simply, to recall Burchfield’s words, “the Bible of prescriptivists.” And, for all its early- 20th-century, southern English stuffiness, it remains today more than capable, when touched up by a few well-placed tweaks, of fulfilling its original purpose of telling us when and how we can say something and when and how we can’t.

Kingsley Amis’s The King’s English is pretty good as well, both in its advice and its light touch.  I’m glad to see that the ultra-cool Mr Unspeakable himself recommends it at the end of a snippet in which he out pedants a would-be but mistaken pedant, Oliver Kamm.

Language nuts are never happier than when catching out someone whose writing they don’t admire giving misapplied advice on vocabulary or grammar or style.   Be man enough to boldly split your infinitives! Prepositions at the end of sentences are something you’ll just have to put up with.

They abolished the study of English grammar at my high school the year after I started.  It was one of my favourite subjects.  You would think – at least I do think – that how the language we speak and write works is as fundamentally interesting for anyone with curiosity as, for instance, where their ancestors came from. 

How I would love to own this book. 

 

 (It's the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary: With additional material from A Thesaurus of Old English (Hardcover) which tells you how words were used in different times.)

Yikes, it’s £206.29 from Amazon.

The Ideologues

There was a piece on Newsnight about a week ago on the links between the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation schools and Hizb-ut-Tahrir.

What I found of interest is that there were a variety of Muslim voices in this piece.  Once it used to only be Abu Hamza, or Anjem Choudary, or Inayat Bungawala that would appear on Newsnight.   So Muslims would be represented by beardy dudes spouting Islamism or apologetics for Islamism, each with a face you wanted to smack.   This Newsnight you got the prim looking headmistress in a hijab and the slick HUT members caught on the back foot but then you got another bunch.

I don’t know if Houriya Ahmed from the Centre for Social Cohesion is Muslim.  But anyway she, Tehmina Kazi from BMSD and Shiraz Maher are much more personable faces to have on telly talking about Muslim stuff.  The first bunch weren’t shown as the only and ugly faces of Muslimhood.   Perhaps the Daily Mail, Express and Telegraph might stop representing Anjem Choudary as the only Muslim in the UK.*

As well as refusing to confirm or deny her membership of HUT (an “irrelevant question”, she said) the headmistress, Farah Ahmed is the typical ideological puritan when talking about Shakespeare.

“Romeo and Juliet which advocates disobeying parents and premarital relations. . . Macbeth which questions the concepts of fate and destiny . . . There are obvious dangers to anyone who watches or reads these plays.”

The ideological puritan normally can’t read with any accuracy as they approach a text in full pre-judgement.  For instance, Romeo and Juliet does not advocate premarital relations.  Juliet says quite specifically that they must marry and at once.  So they do.  Far too young, of course, since Juliet is not yet fourteen but they don’t premarital:-

If that thy bent of love be honourable,
Thy purpose marriage, send me word to-morrow,
By one that I’ll procure to come to thee,
Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite;
And all my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay
And follow thee my lord throughout the world.

The ideological puritan reads for the moral interpretation.   The Marxist ideological puritan (Christopher Caudwell) read The Tempest and saw Caliban as the serf, Ariel as the apotheosis of the free wage- labourer.

The ideological puritan wants literature, music, art to serve the purpose of the ideology.  Everything else is a frivolous or evil distraction.  So the Taliban banned all songs except the purely religious or those in praise of the Taliban. 

Shakespeare does not fit in an ideological framework – no imaginative writer worth reading does, of course.   He deals with complexity, shades of meaning, ambiguity.  “He loved the surface of the earth,” Orwell said, that is, loved to observe life in all its variety, and those who love to observe the world are always going to seem suspect to those whose chief purpose is to change it.

*Fat chance.  His antics make a good story.