MYTHS OF RADICALISATION
June 2, 2013 § 3 Comments
How do we stop young Muslims becoming radicalized? That has been the question posed by many politicians, policy makers, analysts and journalists in the aftermath of the killing of Lee Rigby in Woolwich last week. Indeed, it has been the question posed ever since the 7/7 bombings first raised the issue of ‘homegrown’ terrorism.
The idea of ‘radicalization’ as the process by which young Muslims get drawn into jihadist circles has become received wisdom within security forces and among politicians, and not just in Britain. There is a widespread belief that extremist groups or ‘hate preachers’ groom vulnerable Muslims for jihadism, in the way that a trafficking gang might groom young girls for prostitution, by indoctrinating them with extremist ideas. The way to prevent Muslims becoming terrorists, many conclude, is to silence the preachers, proscribe extremist groups and close down Islamist websites. It was not surprising to find that these are precisely the proposals now being considered by Theresa May.
The trouble is that there is little to suggest that ‘radicalisation’ is a useful way of thinking about why a handful of Muslims might become potential terrorists. « Read the rest of this entry »
THE ENLIGHTENMENT – AND WHY IT STILL MATTERS
May 30, 2013 § 1 Comment
‘If I knew something useful to me, and harmful to my family, I would reject it from my mind’, the French Enlightenment philosophe Montesquieu famously wrote. ‘If I knew something useful to my family and not to my country, I would try to forget it. If I knew something useful to my country, and harmful to Europe, or useful to Europe and harmful to Mankind, I would look upon it as a crime’.
Montesquieu’s sentiment expresses, for Anthony Pagden, the essence of the Enlightenment. In the belief that all humans ‘share a common identity and thus belong ultimately to a single global community – a “cosmopolis”’ lies, he suggests, the Enlightenment’s greatest legacy. The Enlightenment – And Why It Matters is both a history of the period and an argument for the importance of the cosmopolitan ideal.
There is no period of history that has been more analysed, debated, celebrated and disparaged than the Enlightenment. Unlike, say, the Renaissance or the Reformation, the Enlightenment is not simply a historical moment but one through which debates about the contemporary world are played out. « Read the rest of this entry »
BAD WEATHER BLUES
May 26, 2013 § 1 Comment
A weekend of glorious sun in London and I’m almost nostalgic for the misery of the previous eight months of rain and hail and wind and fog. More than once during that time I was reminded of the T-Bone Walker song:
They call it Stormy Monday
But Tuesday’s just as bad.
They call it Stormy Monday
But Tuesday’s just as bad.
Lord, and Wednesday’s worse
And Thursday’s all so sad.
Not to worry, the rain returns tomorrow. So, in celebration of the wet and the windy, the cold and the miserable, here is a small gallery of bad weather blues:
REFLECTIONS ON WOOLWICH
May 23, 2013 § 34 Comments
1
It was a mad, barbarous attack, more akin to a particularly savage form of street violence than to a politically motivated act. What was striking about the incident was not just its depravity but the desire of the murderers for that depravity to be captured on film. This was narcissistic horror, an attempt to create a spectacle, enact a performance, and generate media frenzy. In that it succeeded. We should not provide the act with greater legitimacy by rationalizing it in political or religious terms. Even to call it a terrorist act is to give it too much credibility.
2
Brutal nihilism and narcissistic hatred are central threads of contemporary jihadism. This is as true of 9/11 and 7/7 and the Boston bombing as it is true of the Woolwich murder. But while 9/11 and 7/7 were degenerate acts, the Woolwich attack shows how much more degenerate such attacks have become over the past decade. This was jihadism as depraved street violence.
3
Such degenerate nihilism is not peculiar to jihadists. It drove the twisted, paranoid fantasies of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass killer, who wanted ‘to create a European version of al-Qaeda’. It underlay the mass shootings in America in Aurora and Sandy Hook. Such acts remain rare. But the inchoate, disengaged, misanthropic rage upon which they draw, and the hatred of people and the indifference to one’s actions that they express, has become typical of a very contemporary form of violence. « Read the rest of this entry »
BEYOND A BOUNDARY
May 19, 2013 § 20 Comments
This year marks the 50th anniversary of CLR James’ wonderful, groundbreaking work Beyond a Boundary. To call it a book about cricket is a bit like calling cricket a ‘game’. Beyond the Boundary blends politics and memoir, history and journalism, biography and reportage, in a manner that transcends literary, sporting and political boundaries. V S Naipaul, not a man given to offering easy praise, described it as ‘one of the finest and most finished books to come out of the West Indies’. John Arlott, that most wonderful of cricket commentators, wrote of Beyond the Boundary, that it was ‘a book so outstanding as to compel any reviewer to check his adjectives several times before he describes it and, since he is likely to be dealing in superlatives, to measure them carefully to avoid over-praise – which this book does not need’.
Beyond the Boundary was a book that CLR James had to write, and that only he could write. Novelist and orator, philosopher and cricketer, historian and revolutionary, Trotskyist and Pan-Africanist – there are few modern figures who can match the intellectual depth, cultural breadth or sheer political contrariness of Cyril Lionel Robert James. He was a lifelong Marxist, yet one with an uncommonly fierce independence of mind that expressed itself both in his rejection of conventional Marxist arguments and in his refusal to repent of his politics even when it became fashionable to do so. He was an icon of black liberation struggles, and yet someone whose politics was steeped in a love of Western literature and Western civilization. He was a man whose affection for cricket was matched only by his love for Shakespeare. The book is in the image of the man himself. Brilliant, complex, contradictory, beautifully observed, deeply insightful, but sometimes also romantic and naïve. And, of course, boundary-crossing. « Read the rest of this entry »
EQUALITY AND THE GODLESS
May 16, 2013 § 2 Comments
I have been in Brussels to attend a conference on the Radical Enlightenment, and to interview Jonathan Israel, the keynote speaker, for an essay I am writing about his work and argument. Israel has transformed our understanding of the Enlightenment with his superlative trilogy published over the past decade: Radical Enlightenment, Enlightenment Contested, and Democratic Enlightenment. At the heart of his argument is his insistence that there were two Enlightenments. The mainstream Enlightenment of Kant, Locke, Voltaire and Hume is the one of which we know and which provides the public face of the Enlightenment. But it was the Radical Enlightenment, shaped by lesser-known figures such as d’Holbach, Diderot, Condorcet and, in particular, Spinoza that provided the Enlightenment’s heart and soul.
The two Enlightenments, Israel suggests, divided on the question of whether reason reigned supreme in human affairs, as the radicals insisted, or whether reason had to be limited by faith and tradition – the view of the mainstream. The mainstream, Israel writes, ‘aspired to conquer ignorance and superstition, establish ideas and revolutionise ideas, education and attitudes by means of philosophy but in such a way as to preserve and safeguard what were judged as essential elements of the older structures, offering a viable synthesis of old and new, of reason and faith.’ By contrast, the Radical Enlightenment ‘rejected all compromise with the past and sought to sweep away existing structures entirely’.
The argument, as can be imagined, has created considerable controversy. « Read the rest of this entry »
DESCARTES’ GHOST
May 12, 2013 § 2 Comments
In completing my book on the history of moral thought I had to reduce the original manuscript by some 30,000 words to get it to a reasonable size. Much of what has been lost is better off left on the cutting room floor. There are, however, some sections coherent enough to be worth reading. So, I am running an occasional series publishing some of the more cogent ‘lost pages’ from the book. The first was on Machiavelli. This extract is on Descrates and his influence (it has not been entirely cut from the book, but is considerably condensed). The book itself, which is called The Quest for a Moral Compass, will be published early next year.
Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, painted around 1657, reveals wonderfully the new eyes through which painters now viewed their subject. It shows a woman, ensconced in her own world, absorbed totally in reading the private words of another. There is a startling stillness about the room. Its physical features, the walls, the drapery, seem to define the boundaries of her mental world. She is alone in the room. There is an open window to the world beyond but she has eyes only for the letter in her hand. Reflected in the window is not the world beyond but her own face. The window is both a portal to the world outside and an opening to her thoughts inside, an expression both of her yearning to break the constraints of her domesticity and her total absorption in her own little world. There is an intimacy about the scene that is truly breathtaking. « Read the rest of this entry »
