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Israel and Iran: why worry?

Benny Morris thinks the choice is now clear and stark: 'Either Iran, led by fanatical, brutal and millenarian leaders, will get the bomb, or it will be prevented from doing so by military assault on its nuclear installations, by America or Israel. If the Americans, who have the capability to do a thorough job, don't do it - and they don't seem to have the stomach for it after Iraq and Afghanistan - then the Israelis, with their more limited capabilities, will have to.'

And (Morris again): 'If the Iranian nuclear project is not halted now by conventional means, there will be, by miscalculation, Iranian assault or Israeli preemption, a nuclear war in the Middle East.'

Trudi Rubin, for her part, spells out several reasons 'why Americans should be worried about a possible spring strike on Tehran'.

In the FT, Tobias Buck sees the Israeli prime minister's tendency to caution as in the scales with the existential threat he perceives to Israel's existence if Iran should acquire nuclear weapons.

And Anshel Pfeffer looks at some issues affecting the possible timing of an Israeli strike.

If you aren't worried about this yet, don't worry; I'm worrying enough in your place.

Update: Here's a somewhat different view from Barry Rubin. (Thanks: JK.)

Writer's choice 337: Linda Sargent

Linda Sargent is a writer who works as a publisher's reader and as a freelance reminiscence advisor. She has published short stories and articles and her first novel, Paper Wings, appeared in 2010; she is also the author of Words and Wings, a training guide to creative reminiscence work, available as a free download from her website. Below, Linda discusses Mem Fox's Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge.

Linda Sargent on Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem Fox

Perhaps I should have chosen Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby after all; surely there's more fodder, more literary class, more of it. Plus: I taught it to a bunch of A level students 30 years ago and so have a usefully annotated copy in my own (unusually) tiny hand-writing, telling me what I can say, and still with strong echoes of the passion I felt for it then, and still do. Ah, too easy, though.

Instead, it has to be Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge, written by Mem Fox and illustrated by Julie Vivas, and never out of print since it was first published in 1984; not bad going for a picture book about a small boy who helps an old lady retrieve, at least momentarily, some of her lost memories. The premise could result in something saccharine and sentimental, a touch patronizing, even.

It doesn't, isn't.

The book came, as with so many, in the form of a gift from a friend and colleague when we were working together on various reminiscence projects back in the 1990s. She reckoned, correctly, that it caught exactly what we were trying to do at the time with some older people and their carers; using objects to help trigger often deeply buried or lost memories. Tricky territory always, but this story shows, to my mind, more effectively than so many manuals ever could, the empathetic and tender caring that ought to be at the heart of any such exploration and why it works so well when training others in this field.

Wilfrid lived next door to an old people's home and knew all the people who lived there. Now that would be wonderful in itself, but it looks as if this story is set in Australia, so maybe things are different there, or perhaps it's a wishful ideal. Not only did he know them, he also knew what they were best at: 'Mrs. Jordan who plays the organ... Mr. Hosking who told him scary stories... Mr. Tippet who was crazy about cricket...' and so on. He especially liked Miss Nancy Alison Delacourt Cooper because she had a big name like him and he told her all his secrets. Then one day he heard his parents call her a 'poor old thing' because she had lost her memory. Of course he wanted to know - truly know - what a memory could be. His father's 'something you remember' just wasn't enough and, if you think about it, would never be enough on its own to make a story, or a person's life.

So Wilfrid asked his friends next door and they came up with the kind of list he and most readers would recognize; 'something warm... something from long ago... something that makes you laugh... something that makes you cry... something as precious as gold...' And off he set to find such things from his own house: 'seashells, a comical puppet on a string, his grandfather's medal, a freshly laid egg, his football'. He took them to Miss Nancy and she started to remember some of the times from her childhood - and here Julie Vivas's softly rich pinks, ochre, blues and greens, and the apparently simple transition from old lady to a little girl, effortlessly seem to animate the text, bringing the past into the present as Wilfrid shared his objects with Miss Nancy and she shared her memories and secrets with him.

The process is not always charming and straightforward, as is unflinchingly shown here when Miss Nancy remembered her brother '... who had gone to the war and never returned...'; but what the book does is to show with both colour and clarity how stories work, where they come from in the truthful essence of our past, how losing them is dangerous (or manufacturing them, as with poor Gatsby, potentially corrosive and deadly). Wilfrid and Gatsby share a kind of innocence. Wilfrid's, though, comes from a sense of wanting to share and to help his friend; Gatsby's objects (those shirts!) are lures which prove to be ultimately hollow and destructive.

The astute Michel de Montaigne observes: 'It seems that the soul loses itself in itself when shaken and disturbed unless given something to grasp onto; and so we must always provide it with an object to butt up against and to act upon.'

The story of Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge illuminates this most powerfully, using just a few words and pictures to great and enduring effect. It's a book I have passed on to many people over the years since it first came into my hands.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

Short epoch?

Opposition and protest can be a long haul, and one should therefore never discount the possibility of a seeming failure here and now contributing, a way down the line, to something necessary and worthwhile. The Occupy movement spoke for a lot of people who object to grotesque levels of social inequality and of individual remuneration in the upper reaches of banking, high finance and elsewhere. Yet this report by the Guardian's Peter Walker casts a sharp light back on some of the exorbitant claims that were initially made by Occupy and its more breathless sympathizers:

During a heady few weeks late last year, camps were springing up around the UK, and Occupy was the country's fastest-growing political movement. A few months on - beset by obstacles including court cases, an influx of the long-term homeless and vulnerable and the sheer cold – the phenomenon, at least in its tent-based form, seems to be almost over.

On Monday, London protesters will hear whether their high court application to appeal against the decision to evict them has been successful – but many other camps have already melted away.
.....
It is a similar story worldwide.
.....
It reignited in September when Occupy Wall Street – a major inspiration for London – took over New York's Zuccotti Park with its soon-ubiquitous "We are the 99%" slogan. Police broke up that camp two months later, and the remaining US outposts are reducing in number all the time. Over the past week or so police have moved into Miami, Austin and Washington, while Occupy Pittsburgh disbanded voluntarily after an eviction order.

Not yet, then, the beginning of a new epoch or harbinger of a totally different civilization. One of the things potential supporters of progressive change in a mature democracy look for, unless they're part of the verkrappt section of the left, is a sign of political seriousness, since the potential costs of a delusional politics are by now well known.

Boycott merchants

It's not a new story, is it?

Israel, uniquely among nations, suffers from being turned into a synecdoche - of the part being taken for the whole. The other theater companies involved in the Globe's program - whether from China, Zimbabwe or the United States - are simply not subject to the same scrutiny of their nation's politics. No one would think of boycotting the English theater because Britain had been involved in the bloody occupation of two countries in recent memory. That would be absurd. Yet it is not absurd when it comes to Israel.

No, it's a story that may seem a bit dull by now. What perhaps gives it a novel twist this time is that it arises from boycott initiatives centred on a production of the The Merchant of Venice at the Globe in London, and fears of consequent disruption; the production is to be in Hebrew and by Israel's Habima Theatre, as part of this year's Cultural Olympiad.

(Just to be completely clear: by posting that NYT link I do not endorse anything that may be implied by the writer's bracketing of the US and Britain together with China and Zimbabwe.)

Farewell Leicester Square

How time does carry them away. Novelists of an earlier generation, I mean. Until maybe a year ago I'd never even heard of Betty Miller (and I'm guessing that not very many readers of contemporary fiction have). But then a book of hers appeared on our shelves, thanks to WotN's devotion to Persephone Books, of which I, too, am now a committed follower, and I recently took it down and gave it a try.

Written in 1935, though not published till 1941, Fairwell Leicester Square's overt central theme is English anti-Semitism in the period in which it is set, particularized through the story of the marriage between Alec Berman, who is Jewish, and a non-Jewish Englishwoman, Catherine Nicolls. Though in one or two places the central theme may speak a bit too obtrusively through Miller's main characters, by and large the book avoids the dangers of agenda-driven fiction, to treat a difficult subject with understanding and literary skill. But the strengths of the book, beyond this, lie in its subtlety of perception in handling the minutiae of personal relationships and the common experience of daily life. There are a couple of passages, for example, on the experience of ageing which would be impressive from a writer of much more mature years but are especially striking written by someone at the age, as Miller then was, of 25. She deserves to be more widely known.

The book contains an informative introduction, from which I learned that Betty Miller wrote several other novels (see here for a forthcoming new edition). I shall try to get hold of them. And once again, good on ya, Persephone.

Ray of light in Burma

Here's a fairly upbeat column from Australia on what's happening in Burma:

Five thousand kilometres to our north, a country that is home to nearly 60 million people, an army of 400,000 men and south-east Asia's second-largest land mass, is moving quickly out of the brutal darkness of dictatorship towards political and economic liberalisation.

Just how fast and how far the process of reform in Burma will go is very much an open question. There is, however, little doubt recent developments are positive, significant and with far-reaching consequences.

Consider this: since President Thein Sein assumed office last March, his government has granted amnesty to more than 6000 prisoners, including journalists, monks and political opponents; censorship of the media has been relaxed; labour laws enabling the right to strike and the right to form a union have been passed; peace deals with warring ethnic groups have been reached; and a date for byelections in which Aung San Suu Kyi will participate has been set.

That is a frenetic pace by any standards, not least those of a country where human rights violations, rigged elections and state cronyism have resulted in its isolation from much of the world since the military took over in 1962.

Recognising these changes, the international community is responding. The European Union and Australia have removed some of their sanctions, the US is restoring full diplomatic relations and foreign [dignitaries] are treading a path to the Burmese capital, Naypyidaw.

My own lack of knowledge about Burma restrains me from offering any comment of my own. But I can pass on the reactions of a friend who does know; they are as follows.

The piece may be a bit starry-eyed, but is along the right lines. On a recent visit to Yangon he [my informant] was struck by the optimism among his friends. There was some worry that it might all go wrong, but there has long been fear in Burmese politics; the hope now slowly spreading is palpable and new. For a visitor the biggest change is that the country is festooned with images of Aung San Suu Kyi, which were illegal until a few months ago.

Blogging instead of scholarship?

I can't believe anyone thinks this is a question worth debating; it's so obviously one where it's not either-or but both-and. There appear to be people, including Cathy N. Davidson, a professor of English at Duke University, who think that blogposts can replace the term paper, essay, or whatever you want to call it, in the educational process. According to this piece in the New York Times, the discussion concerns students at both high-school and university level. I've got nothing against the notion (I couldn't have, could I?) that there might be advantages in the blogpost form and blogging medium for exploring ideas, making them available more easily and widely, learning to be brief when one needs to, saying things in a more informal and colloquial way.

On the other hand, to dispense with longer pieces of work, backed up by a more formal apparatus of footnote references, bibliography and so forth, is to forgo the teaching of important disciplines of research and argument. At the most basic level, an education that didn't convey to students that there are matters which can't be settled quickly, but require patience, the gathering of evidence, careful reading and deliberation, and the setting out of reasons at some length, would be an education that was seriously remiss. There's nothing wrong with using, and adapting to, new media of expression and communication; but the idea that genuine learning can all be accommodated within short and speedy forms is a surrender and not an improvement. Not all high-school and university students go on to the world of scholarship; but they ought to have a taste of what it's about.

On the origins of opposition to liberal interventionism

Jonathan Freedland is arguing that military intervention isn't always wrong. He's arguing it apropos Syria. Even though he isn't calling for immediate military action to stop the killing there, he allows that it could have to come to that. His column is prompted by surprise at the fact that the Stop the War Coalition is demonstrating not to protest at 'the truly shocking slaughter' being perpetrated by the Assad regime, but rather against the possibility of US intervention in Syria or Iran.

It is needless for me to say here that I agree with Jonathan that military intervention isn't always wrong. But, though I do agree about that, I disagree with his explanation for this demo directed against US intervention. Here is what Jonathan says:

There's a one-word explanation for how anti-war activists find themselves more exercised by the prospect of intervention to stop murderous violence than by the murderous violence itself. That word is Iraq. The 2003 invasion of Iraq has tainted for a generation the idea once known as "liberal interventionism".

There will be some sector of anti-war opinion that has been made wary about liberal interventionism by the war in Iraq. But so far as that segment of it explicitly picked out by him in this piece - that is to say, activists in and around the Stop the War Coalition - Jonathan starts the clock at the wrong time. The forces of the 'anti-war' left oppose all wars led or joined by America; they were doing so long before the Iraq war in 2003. They opposed intervention in 1991 to evict Saddam's armies from Kuwait, just to pick out one relevant example. It's anti-imperialism that always does the work for them, and slaughter of civilians by oppressive regimes is one of those facts of the world to be endured without ever contemplating Western military intervention anywhere. It's hard to imagine an exception to this generalization arising - unless the US, Britain or some other Western power were to intervene against Israel.

All the same, despite the disagreement, I'm glad to see Jonathan now defending the principle of liberal interventionism. In September 2009 he reported on the view, on both the left and the right at the Labour Party conference, that 'Blair's doctrine of "liberal interventionism"... should be dumped in the nearest skip', its practice having proved disastrous. True, he didn't actually endorse this view, but he registered no misgiving about it either.

The normblog profile 404: Harry Langford

Harry Langford is a 20-year-old blogger who comes from Birmingham. He is currently reading law at undergraduate level and has a particular interest in human rights, public law and aspects of international law. Harry has aspirations to become a barrister. He is a Labour Party activist and has worked as a Parliamentary Intern to a Labour MP. He blogs at What's Next?

Why do you blog? > I tweet quite a lot (@harrylangford), but there came a point where I realized that I was going to need more than 140 characters to offer anything other than a very simplistic opinion. It gives me an outlet to speak directly to people who are interested in the same issues as I am and have discussions on those topics, which I enjoy.

What has been your best blogging experience? > So far? Setting up my new blog and getting a good reaction to it – particularly when I posted something that really sparked debate.

What has been your worst blogging experience? > Writing a blog post of thousands of words which I then read back to myself; it didn't flow logically and I had to scrap it. That was quite disheartening.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Keep at it. Your writing will improve and it will become more worthwhile.

Who are your intellectual heroes? > Anthony Crosland, Tony Blair, Anthony Giddens and Peter Gould.

What are you reading at the moment? > The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli.

Who are your cultural heroes? > Aaron Sorkin. The West Wing and Studio 60 are sublime examples of what TV drama should be.

What is your favourite poem? > 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' by William Wordsworth.

What is your favourite song? > 'Viva la Vida' by Coldplay.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > The whole issue of human rights when I discovered the principle of positive liberty.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > Social democracy.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > Religious fundamentalism of all varieties.

Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > Marx's Capital. The first book to really get me thinking.

Who are your political heroes? > Winston Churchill and Tony Blair.

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > Complete the New Labour project. Truly devolve power and responsibility into the hands of normal people, thus protecting public services from the hands of central government.

What would you do with the UN? > Substantially reform it, particularly the veto system (which I would scrap in its current form). Change the voting to a qualified majority system.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > Right now, the financial crisis. How it will be resolved is yet to be determined, and I think that it will radically alter the power balance in the world away from the traditional global powers.

Do you think the world (human civilization) has already passed its best point, or is that yet to come? > When you study history, it seems that mankind almost always thinks the best is in the past. History shows us that that is never true and that human civilization has the ability to find and achieve a new pinnacle of development.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > Have no regrets, and do everything that you want to do.

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > Possibly, but there would probably be an awful lot of argument.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Politeness. If people are polite to each other then it makes life much easier.

What personal fault do you most dislike? > People who have an unduly high opinion of themselves.

What is your favourite proverb? > 'Practice makes perfect'.

What, if anything, do you worry about? > The future. As I have grown older it seems to become more uncertain.

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > San Francisco.

What do you like doing in your spare time? > Reading, watching ice hockey, and listening to music.

What is your most treasured possession? > A collection of leather-bound books that I have inherited.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > Jonathan Lynn and Anthony Jay for writing Yes, Minister.

Which English Premiership football team do you support? > Aston Villa.

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money? > I probably wouldn't radically change my life. I would still want to work, and I would like to think that I would use the money to make a positive difference in the world.

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > Blair, Thatcher and Churchill.

[A list of all the normblog profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]

Stumbling over politics and morality

Chris isn't sure whether politics should be about morality. He isn't sure for four reasons: morality is weak against power; policies are often morally ambiguous; morality can distract us from structural explanantions of people's conduct; and issues of morality are disputed. All of these things are true - and yet politics cannot bypass being about morality, among other things.

This is demonstrated by the two points Chris immediately goes on to make. (1) 'The left should appeal more to efficiency.' But efficiency for what? Efficiency only dictates that you adopt the least costly, speediest etc, means to certain ends; however, unless you have a way of deciding on those ends, efficiency becomes an empty watchword. Moral considerations are pertinent to choosing ends. Otherwise we might just be picking them out of a hat - as in the most efficient way of robbing people, destroying buildings and so forth. (2) Chris then recommends, as an alternative to both managerialism and moralism, the 'third possibility' Marxism. Well, Marxism may be distinct from 'moralism' in some meanings of this latter term. But Marxism embodies a clear ethical standpoint: it holds capitalism to be unjust because it is based on exploitation; and that very notion, Marxian exploitation, cannot be defined and elaborated except by making reference to certain moral expectations about who should get what and who shouldn't.

Assad's crimes

From Human Rights Watch:

The Syrian government should immediately stop its shelling of residential neighborhoods in the city of Homs, Human Rights Watch said today. Since February 3, 2012, the attacks have killed more than 300 persons in the city, according to Syrian monitoring groups, and wounded hundreds [of] others, including women and children. No adequate medical assistance is available to the victims due to a blockade of the city by government forces and fear of arrest if treated at government-controlled hospitals, Human Rights Watch said.

Here - where you can also watch the short video featuring Anna Neistat: 'We concluded that these crimes constitute crimes against humanity: they were widespread, and they were perpetrated as part of government policy.'

There are pictures here and here.

From a discussion by Professor Chris Brown:

To return to the key question, where do we go from here? When the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty brought out their report on the Responsibility to Protect they anticipated the possibility of a Security Council veto in circumstances where there was a 'conscious-shocking situation crying out for action'[,] arguing that although action bypassing the Security Council would be fraught with difficulty it might still be the least-worst option. Is such action justified in this case?

Fiction with an agenda

There's a discussion by Josh Cook here of the idea that writing with an agenda 'creates bad literature'. Cook's first response is to cite a number of what he sees as counter-examples: 1984, Johnny Got His Gun, Catch-22, The Castle, etc. It's not hard to extend the list. I would add Vasily Grossman's Everything Flows that I posted about recently. But Cook then goes on to consider where this idea of agendas being bad for fiction comes from. Amongst his suggestions is that some highly committed political literature is indeed bad:

Literature with an agenda can be everything its critics accuse it of being. There are few things more frustrating in reading than getting smashed in the face with a moral.

I'm not a writer of fiction so am wary of sticking my neck out about this. But isn't it simply a matter of the difference between doing things badly and doing them well? The danger in writing fiction with an agenda is that the latter looms so large that the fiction itself becomes 'clunky' with it: the characters spouting messages in a way that lacks all subtlety or isn't true to life or both. Instead of complex people, we find ourselves looking at cardboard cutouts. Some of the intricacies of the world are lost in partisan caricature. Or the agenda shapes the plot so that it is forced, not credible. And so on.

To say all of this can happen, however, isn't to say that it must. It's a matter of the writer's depth of perception and her skill. This no doubt oversimplifies a difficult issue, but it's how it strikes me. More generally, a lot of fiction without an overt or narrowly political agenda has stuff to say, truths it wants to convey, and this too is an agenda of sorts.

Not taking it for granted

A conversation in the normblog household this lunch-time...

WotN: You take this orchid for granted. We got it last June and I've managed to keep it going all this time. It's even flowering.

Me: (Thinking about something)...

WotN: You didn't hear that, did you?

Me: Was it something about an orchid?

WotN: Yes. I said that you take this orchid for granted. We've had it since last June and I've carefully kept it going. It's flowering profusely.

Me: I don't take it for granted. I wasn't aware of its existence.

From this, readers, you should not infer that I'm a hard, uncaring person. No, I'm a most sensitive soul. However, I wasn't aware of the plant on the kitchen window-sill. It's the kind of thing I easily miss. WotN hasn't fully come to terms with this particular failing of mine.

Predictable West

You gotta love laugh at the Guardian. Take a look:

By vetoing the Arab League's Syria plan, even after the drafters had made substantive concessions, Russia and China stopped the international effort dead in its tracks, at least for the time being. This was a dismayingly reactionary decision by the two powers, lamented not just by predictable western nations but also by many in the region who saw the resolution as a chance to underscore the regime's isolation and boost UN credibility in the wake of the Arab spring.

You see? It wasn't merely 'predictable' Western lamentation; why, many in the region - a much better lot - were prevented by the veto from underscoring Syria's isolation. Er... the predictable Western bunch, then, weren't they also in the underscoring business? Never mind, let's press on. Russia's and China's vetoes, the Groan continues, have given the Assad regime 'a green light to intensify its assault on its own people', landing Putin and Hu Jintao with a share of responsibility for the renewed bloodshed. Even so:

There is a case, of an extremely limited sort, to be made for some of Russia's obstructionism over Syria. Moscow has decided it was misled by the west over Libya. It is therefore determined not to help sanction any sort of repetition over Syria.

How limited the case is for Russia's obstructionism is then made clear, however, by the additions (1) that 'the vetoed UN motion explicitly renounced regime change and the use of force', and (2) that 'the issue now is Syria not Libya'. And let's not forget, from before, (3) the 'green light' shown for a further murderous assault.

They can't just condemn the Russian and Chinese veto, no frills. There has to be some even-handed poking at the predictable West. Who writes this stuff? One might be forgiven for thinking it was Jonathan Steele.

It's his party, you can cry if you want to

If a lot of people are celebrating and generally making a hoo-ha about something or somebody, you can bet your finest silk garment that someone will in due course pop up and start throwing cold water. Just so, with respect to Dickens today on his bicentenary - and John Sutherland. I don't get it. Nobody is obliged to read Dickens, much less to like his books, and nobody has to join the party. So keep out of it if that's your preference. But the cold water? Let those who want to enjoy the man's books do so, why don't you.

I mean it's only Charles Dickens. Once you go beyond expressing your own lack of enthusiasm to mount a general case against the size of the party, you're bound to perpetrate some folly or other. And so Sutherland does. Thus, by a reference to Julian Barnes's winning of the Booker for The Sense of an Ending, he (Sutherland) has a pop at 'elevating [Dickens] above all the others as "the champ"'. This reflects, so he says, an 'ethos of competition' in which if some win, others lose - like all the superb novels that didn't win the Booker and so became 'certified losers'; and, by implication, like all the other Victorian novelists who weren't Dickens. Come on, already! You can think - as I do - that The Sense of an Ending was a worthy winner without devaluing any other recent book. It's a literary prize (and everyone knows, or should do, how that works), not some golden ranking in the Hall of Eternity.

Similary, it is Dickens's bicentenary year. It might therefore be OK for those who want to mark it to mark it, and without buying a fat pig. This doesn't, not in any way, entail disrespect for other English novelists. Me, I'm celebrating Dickens's birthday, even though I wouldn't rank him above Jane Austen. I'll celebrate her birthday too. Sutherland, by listing 10 Victorian novels, 'as good as, or better than, anything Dickens wrote', cautions us against forgetting the others: Eliot, Middlemarch; Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge; Brontë, Jane Eyre; other Brontë, Wuthering Heights... My goodness, who knew? But let me point out one relevant consideration if you're talking comparisons, as Sutherland plainly is here. Set Charles Dickens against Emily Brontë, just for example, and he enjoys a certain advantage over her. No, it's not that he's male; and it's not that Wuthering Heights can't compete against many of Dickens books and come out a winner. Through no fault of her own, Emily Brontë completed only one novel. Dickens created a fictional world so large, so abundant and so perceptive about the human predicament that he still speaks across the generations and in every language. The cold water just splashes back at those who throw it.

A sentimental attachment

I know nothing about the Rev Dr Peter Mullen other than what it tells me here: 'Rector of St Michael, Cornhill and St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in the City of London' etc. But he seems a little confused:

The bombing and shelling of civilians by the Syrian army is an outrage and a disgrace. Assad is a monster. These things are not in doubt. But what is quite incredible, naive and stupid is the universal reaction of the mass media to the refusal of Russia and China to back a strong resolution for Assad's removal. How many times do these bien pensant commentators and leader-writers have to be told that nations act according to what they perceive to be their national interests?

Mullen is not confused about his thesis that nations by and large act on their national interests as they construe these, and not out of a concern for 'the doctrine of universal human rights'. However, he goes further and refers disparagingly to 'a sentimental attachment to non-existent universal values'. In which case Mullen needs to think again about why it is that there's no doubt that the military assault on civilians in Syria is 'an outrage and a disgrace'. If this is not on account of any universal values, it must just be because the murder of civilians isn't to Mullen's own taste, or else doesn't accord with some non-universal - perhaps purely local, or merely Western - values. But then why should the Syrian regime stay its hand? In some places, there's a norm against the deliberate killing of civilians, in other places you can kill them if you want.

I'm not well up in the varieties of Christian doctrine, but I have to say, this one comes as a surprise to me. (Thanks: RB.)

Writer's choice 336: Anne Stott

Anne Stott is a historian, with interests in religious and women's history. She is the author of Hannah More: The First Victorian, which won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for literary biography in 2004. Her new book, Wilberforce: Family and Friends, will be published by Oxford University Press next month. Here Anne (who has contributed earlier posts in this series, on Jane Austen and Jane Eyre) writes about 'Dickens and religion'.

Anne Stott on Dickens and Religion

[This post is indebted to the two-volume edition of John Forster's Life of Charles Dickens (1873, 1874), Denis Walder's ground-breaking Dickens and Religion (George Allen & Unwin, 1981; reprinted Routledge, 2007), the discussion of Dickens's religious views on the Victorian web and Professor Andrew Sanders's talk, 'Charles Dickens: Christian', given to the winter meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society on 9 January 2011. The views below are my own.]

In September 1844, while Dickens was on holiday with his family in Genoa, he had a disturbingly vivid dream. A figure appeared to him, which he interpreted as the spirit of his sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, who had died suddenly at the age of seventeen, leaving him distraught. As his biographers have pointed out, his improbably virtuous heroines are modelled on his idealization of a girl who never grew old and who left him with a wistful memory of unsullied purity and goodness. In his dream, he asked Mary, 'What is the True religion?... You think, as I do, that the Form of religion does not so greatly matter if we try to do good? Or... perhaps that the Roman Catholic Church is the best? Perhaps it makes us think of God oftener and believe in him more steadily?' To this, Mary's spirit replies, 'For you it is the best.' Dickens then woke to find the tears running down his face.

The dream gives us a curious insight into Dickens's subconscious. Though he was to express sympathy for the persecuted Catholics in Barnaby Rudge, he did so from a humanitarian rather than a religious perspective. He never in his waking moments showed any sympathy for Roman Catholicism, and the robust Protestantism of his Pictures from Italy and A Child's History of England offended some Catholic reviewers. But his dream took place in a city surrounded with images of the Virgin, and Mary appeared to him wearing the blue robes of a Raphael Madonna. It rose out of the same place in his imagination that was to create the female redemptive figures of Florence Dombey, Agnes Wickfield, Amy Dorrit and Lucie Manette.

The Dickens of the waking, rather than the dream, world took a deep interest in the religious questions that dominated Victorian thought. On his visit to America he became attracted to Unitarianism and for two or three years when back in London he worshipped at a Unitarian church in Little Portland Street. In middle age, when he had returned to the Church of England, he welcomed the appearance of Essays and Reviews (1860), a series of essays by a group of Anglican churchmen who were attempting to reconcile Christianity with modern knowledge, and his bookshelves contained a copy of Darwin's Origin of Species. To use the terminology of his day, Dickens was a Broad Churchman.

Two years after the Mary Hogarth vision, Dickens began work on a book for his children that was not intended for publication. This was The Life of Our Lord, 'a little version of the New Testament', as he described it, which recounts the life of Christ in a vivid, unsophisticated fashion. The message is what any reader of his novels would expect: 'Never be proud or unkind, my dears, to any poor man, woman, or child... And when people speak ill of the Poor and Miserable, think how Jesus Christ went among them, and taught them, and thought them worthy of his care.' When his son Edward ('Plorn') emigrated to Australia in 1868, Dickens, deeply distressed at the separation (even though he had engineered it), handed him a letter: 'I put a New Testament among your books for the very same reasons, and with the very same hopes, that made me write an easy account of it for you when you were a little child. Because it is the best book that ever was or ever will be known in the world, and because it teaches you the best lessons by which any human creature who tries to be truthful and faithful to duty can possibly be guided.' The religious themes of his novels were no mere add-ons to gratify a pious readership but were integral to his view of life and his artistic imagination.

However, though there are many Christian references in his novels, and many biblical echoes that can be missed by modern readers, Dickens was not an explicitly religious writer in the style of his Tractarian contemporary, Charlotte M. Yonge. He disliked the tendency of the Ragged Schools to thrust religion down the throats of poor children and he took care to ensure that the prostitutes of his friend Angela Burdett-Coutts's philanthropic venture, Urania Cottage, were not subjected to religious indoctrination. His model was the unobtrusive Christianity shown by characters like Esther Summerson and Joe Gargery. Their quiet goodness stands in contrast to the harsh legalism of much institutional religion. When Jo the crossing-sweeper lies dying, it is the layman, Allan Woodcourt, not Mr Chadband, the unctuous Dissenting minister, who teaches him the Lord's Prayer [Bleak House, ch. xlvii]. Reflecting on the 'gloomy taint' of the Murdstones' child-hating Calvinism, David Copperfield reflects that 'there was a child once set in the midst of the Disciples' [ch. iv]. In the great dénouement scene of Little Dorrit [Bk II, ch. xxxi], Amy Dorrit begs Mrs Clenham, trapped in her prison of wrongdoing and vengefulness, to be guided by 'the patient Master who shed tears of compassion for our infirmities'. The alternative to bad religion is not secular morality, but the practice of the New Testament.

There was of course little Christian compassion in the self-righteous cruelty with which Dickens treated his unoffending wife once he became infatuated with the actress, Ellen Ternan. In his earlier novels he had engaged with the themes of conversion and redemption and shown how Scrooge, the two Martin Chuzzlewits, and Mr Dombey all experience painful changes of heart. With the breakup of his marriage, he dug deeper into the great questions of human existence and out of his own anguish created the disappointed, troubled heroes of his later novels. Arthur Clenham is saved by Little Dorrit's love. For Sydney Carton redemption comes through death, but also through offering words of Christian comfort to the little seamstress waiting her turn at the guillotine. For Pip, the change is more complex and problematic. When Miss Havisham asks his forgiveness, he replies, 'There have been sore mistakes; and my life has been a blind and thankless one; and I want forgiveness and direction far too much, to be bitter with you' [ch xlix]. It is well known that the so-called 'happy' ending in which Pip is reunited with Estella was written against Dickens's own better judgement. There is no easy way out for two such damaged people - nor for Dickens himself.

In the late, sombre novels he began to explore the human condition with the kind of depth found in other Christian writers, such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Marilynne Robinson. But though his work darkened and gained in complexity, his fundamental belief that the New Testament contained the only necessary guide to living did not change, neither did his passionate sympathy for the poor and oppressed. It is for this reason that Dostoevsky saw him as a great Christian; though of course he was a more deeply flawed one than his Russian contemporary could have known.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

Warner without warning

Just take a look at this, a massive switch-hit by David Warner...

But should this kind of shot be accepted within the rules of cricket? Tim Blair makes a good case for it.

To bury the past

It is because these things happen and, so far as we have any sound basis for expecting, are likely to continue happening for some time yet, if not forever, that human justice is as important as it is, its unavoidable imperfections notwithstanding. The efforts of Baltasar Garzón to investigate the many deaths due to Francoist repression in Spain belong in this category, and there is some 'irony' in the attempt to obstruct them:

Spanish courts, led by the indomitable Garzón, have pursued dictators, torturers and human rights abusers around the globe, pioneering a bold use of international law. They chase Nazi criminals, jail Argentinian torturers and even had Chile's former dictator, Augusto Pinochet, arrested in London. Yet crimes committed on their own doorstep are untouchable.

It is the investigator of crimes against humanity 'who is accused of committing a crime'. In the following detail you may also recognize a certain kinship with the subject matter of the previous post.

Pedro Solsona, whose father was tortured and killed after agreeing to feed some anti-Franco guerrillas in 1947, recalls a Captain Lobo who spread fear through eastern Castellón in the 1940s. "He would beat shepherds and stop halfway to smoke a cigarette," he told El País newspaper last week. "He wasn't big or strong, just full of hate."

Even torturers need a break.

See also the post by Sonia Cardenas at Dissent.

Why evil is done

Howard Jacobson tells of a question put to him by a Holocaust survivor:

"In the mornings," he said, "in Buchenwald, when the guards lined us up to count us, to see how many had survived the night, and we stood there in the cold in just our shirts and bare feet, an orchestra played, a Jewish orchestra playing classical music. It had no effect on me. I was too numb to feel anything. Now, before I am able to sleep, I have to listen to classical music. No, it doesn't bring back memories of the music the orchestra played then. I listen to classical music now because it helps me to forget. They are not connected. But this is my question – why did the Germans order that music to be played?"

I shook my head. Because they loved music so much they didn't want an hour to pass, even in Buchenwald, in which they didn't hear any? Because they especially liked the way Jews made music and knew there would soon be no Jews left to make it? Because they wanted further to refine their cruelty: "You think of yourselves as cultivated, well look at you now!" Who knows? Who knows anything?

I have no more claim to know about this than anyone else does, and I certainly have no directly relevant experience. However, one thing I have taken from the reading I've done in this area - from Primo Levi, and David Rousset, and Charlotte Delbo, and Elie Wiesel, as also from Dostoyevsky - is that people seem not to need reasons as such to do this kind of thing. There is no limit to the inventiveness of the human capacity for cruelty, and in that sense evil is bottomless. This doesn't mean either that everyone will do evil or that humans are more evil than good. It only means that people's creative talents are boundless and when they apply themselves to cruelty no moral or other barrier will restrict them from horrors or from ghastly ingenuities. This is a conclusion written not only, everywhere, in the history of the Holocaust but also in a thousand and more other episodes of moral criminality.

It is also why so many well-meaning sociologies and psychologies of extreme human wrong-doing miss a certain mark. Endeavouring to find preceding causes influencing individuals to behave badly - something one can always do because no human action comes out of a causal vacuum - they have a tendency then to downplay the gravity of the evil committed, as if it proceeded by an unbroken chain from its putative causes. But what the example Howard was given here shows is that such evils always 'exceed' their causes, real or supposed. As depressing as it is to have to acknowledge this, they reflect those human sources of all that is also admirable about our species - the freedom to choose and the fertility of the human imagination.