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Morality, necessity and realism in Syria

As one of those (few?) who doesn't know what the best thing to do about Syria is, I don't mind sharing with my readers the views of people who are more confident that they do know. Here's Marko Attila Hoare, for whom the West's failure to support the Syrian National Coalition with arms 'is strengthening the hand of al-Qaida' there. Marko writes:

If Iran, Russia and Hezbollah feel free to intervene with arms and troops on the side of Assad while the west continues to tie the hands of the democratic resistance, the pursuit of "negotiations" and "ceasefires" will be merely the fig leaf behind which Assad completes his victory.
.....
The west's inaction in the face of the pending Ba'athist and Shia Islamist victory amounts to a colossal failure of leadership. It is all the more surprising, coming as it does after the successful 2011 intervention in Libya, in which western intervention saved the revolution against Gaddafi, without the loss of a single western soldier. In the subsequent free elections in Libya, the liberals defeated the Islamists, dramatically disproving the Cassandras' claims that intervention amounted to support for al-Qaida. Unlike the misguided 2003 adventure in Iraq, an intervention in Syria – in the form of arms supplies to the FSA and the imposition of a no-fly zone – would enjoy broad support both in Syria and the wider region, including from Turkey and the Arab League. In these circumstances, the ostrich-like stance of the anti-interventionists appears all the more bizarre.

A rather different perspective is offered by Dan Drezner, though it's one he characterizes as being 'morally questionable':

Naturally, this will feed the "return of the liberal hawks" meme that's spreading in some quarters. Other commentators will gnash their teeth or decry that this is the first ill-considered step towards dragging the United States into another Middle Eastern war.

To your humble blogger, this is simply the next iteration of the unspoken, brutally realpolitik policy towards Syria that's been going on for the past two years. To recap, the goal of that policy is to ensnare Iran and Hezbollah into a protracted, resource-draining civil war, with as minimal costs as possible. This is exactly what the last two years have accomplished... at an appalling toll in lives lost.

This policy doesn't require any course correction... so long as rebels are holding their own or winning. A faltering Assad simply forces Iran et al into doubling down and committing even more resources. A faltering rebel movement, on the other hand, does require some external support, lest the Iranians actually win the conflict. In a related matter, arming the rebels also prevents relations with U.S. allies in the region from fraying any further.

So is this the first step towards another U.S.-led war in the region? No. Everything... this administration has said and done for the past two years, screams deep reluctance over intervention. Arming the rebels is not the same thing as a no-fly zone or any kind of ground intervention. This is simply the United States engaging in its own form of asymmetric warfare. For the low, low price of aiding and arming the rebels, the U.S. preoccupies all of its adversaries in the Middle East.

The moment that U.S. armed forces would be required to sustain the balance, the costs of this policy go up dramatically, far outweighing the benefits. So I suspect the Obama administration will continue to pursue all measures short of committing U.S. forces in any way in order to sustain the rebels.

... It's a policy that makes me very uncomfortable... until one considers the alternatives. What it's not, however, is a return to liberal hawkery.

So, to conclude: the United States is using a liberal internationalist rubric to cloak a pretty realist policy towards Syria.

For Benedict Brogan, intervention by Britain is a terrible idea but perhaps a necessary one nonetheless:

The coalition against intervention in Syria appears to have all the arguments on its side. It is, by any measure, a terrible idea, and on current standings the Prime Minister would struggle to secure necessary support in the Commons. But Mr Cameron says he wants to save Britain from international relegation. In which case, membership of the league of front rank nations comes with a price that is sometimes quite awful. Going in could have consequences that, after Iraq and Afghanistan, we are all too familiar with. But we should acknowledge, as he evidently does, that sitting this one out carries a price as well. The global race is not just about economics. It is about the willingness of the few countries with the capacity to intervene to stand up and be counted when the need arises. Mr Cameron knows that the burden is always ours.

On which, see also Alex.

Writer's choice 385: Helen Rappaport

Born in Bromley, England, Helen Rappaport studied Russian at Leeds University but ill-advisedly rejected suggestions of a career in the Foreign Office and opted for the acting profession. After appearing on British TV and in films until the early 1990s, she abandoned acting and embraced her second love, history, and with it the insecurities of a writer's life. She is a specialist in Russian history and 19th-century women's history. Helen's books include An Encyclopedia of Women Social Reformers, No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War, and Conspirator: Lenin in Exile. Her latest title is Capturing the Light: The Birth of Photography; and Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses is scheduled for publication early next year. Here Helen writes about A.J.A. Symons's The Quest for Corvo.

Helen Rappaport on The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography by A.J.A. Symons

What on earth could possibly be interesting about a biography of an obscure writer still known only to the initiated few, written by an equally forgotten author? Well, those who have never read this book and who love the process of discovery, as I do, who find the challenge of piecing together the facts of a lost and barely documented life utterly engrossing, will find this book as compelling and dark and intriguing as I did when I first read it. For this is not just the story of Frederick Rolfe, aka 'F[athe]r. Rolfe', aka the equally bogus 'Baron Corvo', it is also, obliquely, the story of another hidden life – that of his biographer Symons.

I can't remember exactly what prompted me to read The Quest for Corvo, but my inscription on the flyleaf of my copy says I bought it in 1993. Back then I was a freelance researcher for the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, which may well have led me to it, at a time when I was also writing short entries for biographical dictionaries and pondering my own first biographical subjects.

Rolfe found the ideal biographer in A.J.A. Symons, an aesthete, eccentric and dandy and who remains as much of an enigma as his subject. As an aficionado of fine and rare books (he was a founder of the First Edition Club), essayist and sometime unsuccessful biographer himself, Symons shared many of the experiences of penury, rejection and artistic frustration that Rolfe endured during his own haphazard and unfulfilled career. As scions of the 1890s they both had connections on the London gay scene, Rolfe managing to be briefly published in the Yellow Book, whose publications Symons avidly collected, and Symons's brother Julian becoming one of Oscar Wilde's first biographers. Despite their shared interests they never crossed paths; but their coming together after Rolfe's death is a poignant and revealing one.

Symons's quest sprang from a conversation he had in the early 1930s with bibliographer and bookseller Christopher Millard, about books that had 'missed their just reward of praise'. Millard suggested that Rolfe's Hadrian the Seventh was one of them. In its story of a failed English hack writer and priest who is plucked from oblivion to become Pope, it presents a distorted self-portrait that mirrors Rolfe's own relentless quest for personal aggrandizement and recognition by his peers. Its satire of the Catholic Church is venomous - a 400-page act of revenge, first on the Scots College (a Catholic seminary in Rome from which Rolfe had been expelled in 1889) and also on all those who in his estimation had spurned or slighted him and denigrated his artistic talents.

After his failed attempt at the priesthood, Rolfe worked intermittently as a painter and photographer, at the same time pursuing a writing career. But he was constantly thwarted in his attempts to get published. In response, the whole of his short, sad and embittered life was lived in an atmosphere of mounting paranoia, watching at the door for enemies. Some called him a sponger, a charlatan, an imposter; he was, at times, all three, but he was also extraordinarily gifted. Yet, perversely, he refused point blank to compromise as a writer and his natural gifts went tragically to waste. As Symons shows, there were a few flashes of friendship and fleeting periods of happiness and self-fulfillment. But they never lasted long. Rolfe's erratic, picaresque career - wearing threadbare clothes and existing on handouts - was lived for the most part in debt and on the edge of destitution. His seething resentment at the bad hand that life had dealt him led him to quarrel with even those few friends he did make. One by one, every single person who offered the hand of friendship, who collaborated on a literary venture or helped Rolfe get his work published, every kind host who gave him free bed and board (often for extended periods of time), was ultimately spurned - and often libelled - by this stubborn outcast.

In response to the catalogue of missed opportunities he had to endure, Rolfe made a profession of the art of insult by letter. But there was artistry even in his invective; these letters, Symons observed, were always written 'in a script more beautiful than is used in Papal Briefs'. There was the same artistry and genius in Rolfe's venom, as in his extraordinary, ornate written works, such as Chronicles of the House of Borgia, crammed full of erudition and obsolete words, Latin and Greek phrases. Such self-indulgence was guaranteed to alienate all but the most devoted and persistent of readers. But Rolfe, the linguistic show-off and narcissist, who always placed himself at the centre of his own narratives, remained an unrepentant elitist.

In 1908 after being dogged by so much artistic misfortune and with £30 in the bank he gave up on England and decamped to Venice, where he swam a great deal and lazed in the sun with the Venetian fisher boys – who increasingly became the focus of his sexual interests. When the money ran out and he was thrown out of his hotel and reduced to sleeping in gondolas and going hungry for days, he wrote begging letters to his few remaining friends in England. 'I am now simply engaged in dying as slowly and as publicly and as annoyingly to all of you professing and non-practising friends of mine as possible,' he told them. In 1912 a few cheques once more bailed him out but his heavy smoking and unsettled lifestyle had fatally undermined his health; as too had the worm of unremitting anger and resentment. 'I am so awfully lonely. And tired,' he wrote in his last letter.

Symons brings Rolfe’s intriguing but often repellent character vividly to life, thanks to his concerted efforts to contact everyone who knew him. Published in 1934, The Quest for Corvo set the standard for a new style of experimental biography that challenged the conventional, cradle-to-grave approach of the genre till then. It made Symons's search for his subject's surviving manuscripts and letters as central to the story as the subject himself, which is why The Quest for Corvo remains a continuing source of inspiration to me, as I try to winkle out the truth of human lives that till now have been lost in the footnotes, or seek to restore the lost or forgotten phases of much better-known lives to history. A.S. Byatt, who wrote the introduction to the latest 2001 reprint, said that she had 'learned much from it about how to construct novels and how to think about human lives'; her novel Possession was directly inspired by it.

This year, 2013, is the 100th anniversary of Rolfe's death. It will no doubt pass unnoticed, as did his pathetic demise in Venice at the age of 53. His extremely rare first editions are highly sought after today; his letters, published posthumously between the 1950s and 1970s, are fascinating. But the written works remain familiar only to the few, bar Hadrian the Seventh, which in its stage adaptation earned a degree of critical acclaim when revived by the Chichester Festival in 1995 starring Derek Jacobi.

Like his subject, A.J.A. Symons, died prematurely - at the age of 41 of a brain tumour. But in writing this still largely unsung masterpiece, he posthumously secured his own place in literary history. He most definitely taught me 'how to think about human lives' and this is a book I shall always treasure.

I still haven't read a single book by Frederick Rolfe though, and never shall. But that's part of the enduring enigma. The subject rather than his written work is, in the end, far more compelling.

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

How many stones for Stoner?

In case I haven't already given enough of a boost here for John Williams's Stoner, I'll just draw your attention to a piece about it by Bryan Appleyard in today's Sunday Times (£). He calls it 'the greatest book you have never read'. He also quotes the view of Ian McEwan:

Great authority in the prose, beautiful, sad, utterly convincing account of an entire life, of how a gifted man can drift into obscurity, can almost lift himself into the clear light of happiness in love, then fall back. The awful wife, the disappointed hopes for the daughter, the bitter lifelong persecution by a fellow academic - it sounds depressing when these elements are listed, but Williams makes a thing of beauty out of them. The subjective rendering of Stoner's death is unsurpassed in modern literature.

I'll leave off now with the observation that it will become less and less true for all values of 'you' that 'you' have never read it.

Blackbird

On the grass verges of a road near us with a lot of traffic, you'll find this guy and friends of his. The traffic doesn't bother them, but pedestrians do; off they jolly well flit. So whatever you think of the quality of my pictures, the fact of them is a minor triumph. I've been trying and failing for months to get close enough with my complicated equipment, otherwise known as an iPhone.

I even got a second shot of him.

He also sings - like this.

No longer dithering over Syria

A month ago I drew attention to Michael Walzer's view that for President Obama to be dithering over Syria was no bad thing in the circumstances. According to a report in the Times of Israel, Michael's thinking has evidently changed over the last few weeks:

[Walzer] said that his position on Syria gradually shifted from skepticism about US military intervention in the early days of the uprising to staunch opposition to it today.

"Now you have jihadi fighters on the one hand and Hezbollah on the other, and it really doesn't look like there's much to choose between... It's almost impossible to describe a desirable outcome in this civil war, and if you don't have a desirable outcome - you can't intervene."

See here for the conditions he specifies for feasible intervention in Syria now.

In view of the misunderstanding created by my last 'dithering' post, I had maybe better say that it can be true that non-intervention in a crisis of this sort has enormous costs even if the benefits of intervention are in doubt. One isn't bound to think one knows what should be done.

The well-known World War II

I had this memory, shared with two of my oldest friends, of an ancient Goon Show; I blogged about it here. Now, eight years later, I've found the recording - I Was Monty's Treble ('the story of the film of the book of the tram'). If it's to your taste, you can find the part remembered in the first six and a half minutes, before Max Geldray puts in an appearance. It was 1958 - but as Eddie Izzard says, timeless.

Ashes bash

Giles Coren in today's Times (£):

So let's cancel the Ashes. I'm sick of Australia. All it has to do, the only thing expected of that entire country on the international stage, is to send a team of cricketers to England every three or four years who are better than ours, and who desperately want to win, so that we in England get a decent series of cricket matches over the summer, which we can heroically win maybe three times a century against all the odds, but which mostly we don't mind losing because in the end we are still British and they, when the fuss has died down and winter comes, will always be Australian.

But none of that works if they're rubbish. None of it! The whole thing is pointless. It's as if the Germans were bad at football - who would care about them then?...

Don't worry that I am jinxing things. I've talked to some cricketers and ex-cricketers in the past few weeks, level-headed men without a triumphalist bone in their body, who have looked at me sadly and said: "I can't predict 5-0 because there's always the weather. But I honestly can't see Australia winning a game." Matches intended to last five days are going to start on Thursday and only make it to the end of Friday if it rains.

Pull the other one. That's the second time I've come across this view in the last few days. It's the romantic delusion - to the fore mostly when England are losing to Australia - that the Poms don't really mind losing to them. Good cricket, respect for a tough foe, and all that. But the truth is that there's no one that England love to beat at cricket more than Australia. And there's no one they hate, really hate, losing to as much. Five-nil, ten-nil, it won't matter - that will go down a treat. And with good reason. There's some history to be made up for here.

And quite right too. Let's not turn the Ashes, the greatest sporting contest there is, into some spiff jolly what-ho production. No quarter asked or given - that's what's made the contest what it is.

The great falsehood

From time to time since the US-led intervention in Iraq, people have popped up to say that the human costs of leaving Saddam in power were never part of the rationale for going to war, that this was merely a post hoc justification once WMD were not found. Being of a helpful disposition, on some of these occasions I would pop up in my turn to point out to those saying this sort of thing, and to others who might be misled by what they were saying, that there was clear evidence to the contrary, particularly in key speeches made by George W Bush and Tony Blair, and that for many of us who supported the Iraq war the potential costs of leaving Saddam in power were indeed central to our support.

Well, now we know. By this I don't mean that we now know that the costs of non-intervention would have been greater than the costs of intervention have in fact been; merely that we now know that the costs of non-intervention could have been greater than the costs of intervention have been. Why we know is because of Syria - and I direct you to two pieces, one by Hopi Sen and the other by Terry Glavin, in case you haven't already seen them. 'Where is the outrage of the humanitarian left?' Hopi asks, referring to the death rate in Syria. And:

The awful truth is that inaction and intervention both have terrible costs, and those who decide between them cannot ever truly know what will result. Some forgot that in the last decade, choosing to believe that only intervention could have a terrible price. I don't forget the reverse now.

No, they didn't forget; they just didn't want to know. Because this was a way of trying to discredit the bona fide reasons of those who supported regime change in Iraq. Terry, for his part, has more about the present human costs in Syria. Clive James wrote a while back:

those appalled by the moral cost of toppling a tyrannical regime are still stuck with counting the moral cost incurred by leaving it alone.

Except that few of them have ever wanted to count this second cost. It has been the great falsehood of the liberal-left during the last decade, and if you detect a certain reticence about that now, you won't be the only one who does. (Thanks, RB, for the James link.)

Medicine across borders

A handwritten doctor's note was found attached to the clothing of a Syrian man brought to Israel in critical condition Tuesday. The note explained, in Arabic, previous surgical procedures and medical care the man had received days before in Syria. It asked Israel to save his life because the Syrian doctors could not provide the necessary medical treatment.

While Israel has started to treat growing numbers of people wounded in Syrian battles close to the border in recent months, this was the first case of a cross-border "transfer" from a Syrian medical facility.

The note, which was signed by a Syrian doctor and dated June 8, opened with "Hello distinguished surgeon" and explained that the patient, aged 28, suffered from a gunshot wound in the chest and shrapnel damage to his diaphragm and liver...

The Syrian doctor performed surgery to address "heavy abdominal bleeding" but noted that "the liver could not be sewed up" and that "it was necessary to examine the condition of the abdominal injury and remove the heavy pressure bandages" that the doctor had applied.

"Please do what is necessary and thanks in advance," the note concluded, while noting the various drugs that had been used during treatment and that the patient had been hospitalized for two days.

Israel has so far treated around 20 Syrians who have been injured as a result of the Syrian civil war, and the IDF has set up a field hospital along the Israeli-Syrian border to help care for the injured. This particular patient, transferred by the IDF to Ziv Medical Center in Safed on Tuesday, is believed to be the first to be treated in Israel who had recent medical care in Syria.

Dr. Amiram Hadari, director of the trauma unit at Ziv hospital, said the procedure carried out in Syria was likely performed in a makeshift hospital and was "rudimentary," but that "it seems that the [Syrian] operation saved his life."

Here. (Thanks: GC.)

Dylan at 20 rollin' on

Sent to me last night as promising a treat, this radio interview with Bob Dylan from 1962 delivered in spades. There's an account of the occasion here on Open Culture, and a transcript of the interview here. And you can hear the songs as well.

Try listening at 35 minutes in. (Thanks: SM.)

The normblog profile 413: Ben Stanley

Ben Stanley was born in Cardiff in 1979. He lived in Bahrain as a child and returned to the UK in the late 1980s to live near Middlesbrough. After studying at the Universities of Warwick and Durham he moved to Warsaw, where he taught English for three years. He returned to the UK in 2005 to do a doctorate on the emergence of Polish populist parties that was awarded by the University of Essex in 2010. Since then Ben has worked in Bratislava and Warsaw, where he currently resides. From September 2013 onwards he will be a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow at the Sussex European Institute. He blogs at Polish Party Politics.

Why do you blog? > To keep track of – and order my thoughts about – events in Polish party politics.

What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > Post little and often. Advice that anybody checking my blog of late can see I have not heeded.

Who are your intellectual heroes? > Leszek Kołakowski, Giovanni Sartori, John Stuart Mill, Michael Oakeshott.

What are you reading at the moment? > A Tale of Two Cultures: Qualitative and Quantitative Research in the Social Sciences by Gary Goertz and James Mahoney. Recommended reading for all methodological imperialists in the social sciences.

Who are your cultural heroes? > Warren Zevon, Stina Nordenstam, Randy Newman, Emmylou Harris, T.S. Eliot, Brian Wilson, Graham Greene, Elliott Smith, Philip Larkin, Jason Isbell, Sandy Denny.

What is the best novel you've ever read? > Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman.

What is your favourite poem? > 'Aubade' by Philip Larkin.

What is your favourite movie? > My Life As A Dog.

What is your favourite song? > 'Wouldn’t It Be Nice', by The Beach Boys.

Who is your favourite composer? > Mahler.

Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > I used to be in favour of a ban on prostitution on the grounds that it invariably involves the objectification and exploitation of women (yes, I know there are male prostitutes, but it is largely an issue about the status of women). However, I realized that I was making the unwarranted assumption that all women cannot exercise their own volition in this case. I cannot ignore the voices of that minority of women - and I am sure it is a minority - who explain why they have chosen of their own free will to become prostitutes. I have come to the conclusion that the duty of a liberal is to oppose those who would deprive women of their right to exercise consent - however those women would construe it.

What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > The libertarian idea that selfishness is not only natural but good, while altruism is unnatural and damaging to society. Both conditions are natural, and both are important.

Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > Albert Hirschman's The Rhetoric of Reaction not only taught me how to understand why I am not a conservative but also impressed upon me the need to be vigilant that my liberalism should not descend into a smug faith in the inexorable victory of progressive values.

Who are your political heroes? > Roy Jenkins, Jacek Kuroń and David Lloyd George. I am not particularly keen on many of Peter Tatchell's ideological preferences, but courage is essential in politics, and Tatchell's courage - both moral and physical - is exemplary.

What is your favourite piece of political wisdom? > 'Don't burn down committees - form your own.' (Jacek Kuroń)

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > Assuming my country is currently Poland, I would repeal the obscenely restrictive abortion laws immediately.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > The combined, conflicted and combustive forces of the anti-Enlightenment.

Do you think the world (human civilization) has already passed its best point, or is that yet to come? > I wouldn't be a liberal if I didn't believe humans were capable of bettering themselves. However, that will depend on whether the right choices are made. I find anti-scientism particularly worrying for this reason.

What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > Come to terms as early as possible with the overwhelming probability that your life is going to be fairly mediocre. Otherwise you will never be satisfied with anything.

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? > I find it hard to imagine that I would last long enough in a relationship with someone who had strongly authoritarian views for it to get to the 'long-term relationship' stage, let alone marriage.

What do you consider the most important personal quality? > The ability to change one's mind after being apprised of contrary facts.

Do you have any prejudices you're willing to acknowledge? > I am prejudiced against people who think anti-intellectualism is a virtue - I actively avoid their company.

What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Fishing. I'd rather sit by the river with a book and a beer and spare myself the purchase of expensive equipment.

Who would play you in the movie about your life? > Philip Seymour Hoffman.

What do you like doing in your spare time? > Idly playing guitar and drinking beer, only one of which I do with any real proficiency.

What talent would you most like to have? > The ability to play the guitar like Richard Thompson.

Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > Dave Allen.

Who are your sporting heroes? > J.P.R. Williams, Paul Scholes, Shane Warne, and the 1996 US women's gymnastics team.

How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money? > I would build a house, amass a collection of vintage Telecasters and travel to the many places I have not yet seen.

If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > Jacek Kuroń, Eleanor Roosevelt and Warren Zevon.

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

Clampdown in Iran

It was predictable enough, but should be highlighted nonetheless. From Amnesty International:

Iran's authorities have intensified the clampdown on dissidents ahead of the country's presidential election on 14 June, Amnesty International said in a new briefing published today.

The briefing, Iran: Repression of dissent intensifies in run-up to presidential elections, documents dozens of arbitrary arrests and other human rights abuses in the run-up to election day, targeting journalists, political activists, trade unionists, advocates of greater rights for Iran's religious and ethnic minorities, and students.

"The escalation in repression is an outrageous attempt by the Iranian authorities to silence critics ahead of the presidential election," said Philip Luther, Director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Programme.

"The surge in recent violations underlines Iran's continued and brazen flouting of human rights standards through its persecution of political dissidents and betrays the glaring absence of a meaningful human rights discourse in the election campaign."

From the briefing itself:

Those targeted include political activists, journalists and other media workers, trade unionists, advocates of greater rights for Iran's religious and ethnic minorities, students and others. In many cases, the full reasons for arrest and detention are not known; in others, those arrested have been brought before the courts on sweeping but vaguely worded charges, convicted and sentenced to prison terms. In yet other cases, individuals who were sentenced in previous years but not made to serve them immediately or else released provisionally for medical reasons have been summoned to prison to serve what remains of their sentences as the authorities seek to pre-empt protests at the time of the presidential election.

But how did Marx find his way to the British Museum?

In the process of explaining why there can be good atheists, Peter Berger argues that to say different is, among other things, to commit the genetic fallacy. Thus:

Conservative Christians... typically argue that the morality at the core of Western civilization, specifically the values of human rights and liberties, is dependent on the Judeo-Christian tradition. Secularization is then assumed to dismantle that tradition, thus bringing about a pervasive relativism and eventually destroying the moral consensus required for the survival of every society.

I think that this argument suffers from what logicians call the genetic fallacy - that is, the view that the validity of any definition of reality depends on the history of the definition. To be sure, the Christian religion, grounded in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, was a very important source of Western civilization. There were other sources - Greek thought and political practice, Roman law, possibly aspects of Germanic traditions, and, crucially, the enormous effects of the rationality of Renaissance and Enlightenment. A distinctive moral discourse resulted from the confluence of all these historical developments. But it is not necessary to keep retracing this history in order to participate in the moral discourse. Once the discourse is formed and available, it can be accessed and embraced by people from different directions, including people from different religious and cultural backgrounds. (Italics in the original.)

Berger goes on to offer supporting material. It includes this homely tale:

Let me give a mundane example that has nothing to do with religion or culture: Some years ago, while in London, I was told of a bookstore in Bloomsbury that specialized in English-language books from India. I wanted the English translation of a recent novel originally published in an Indian language. I had difficulty finding the bookstore, and wandered around looking for it. Suddenly I came on the impressive old building of the British Museum (the one before it moved to its new quarters); I had not been there before. I then discovered that the book store I was looking for was virtually around the corner. Not long afterward I was with someone who wanted to see the old British Museum, with its reading room where Karl Marx labored to write his hugely misleading and hugely influential Das Kapital. I now knew where it was. I could go there directly, without retracing my journey in search of the bookstore.

So clear it could almost confuse you. Peter Berger wouldn't be an academic by any chance, would he? (Thanks: LG.)

Soaring up into the clouds

What do movements of protest and movements of change need in order to succeed? Far be it from me (and similar disclaimers) to pretend to offer a comprehensive answer. But they need some anger, and they need numbers, and they need good arguments, and they need hope. Yes, hope. And then some: they need inspiring watchwords, and perhaps a bit of rhetoric to throw into the mix, and a song or two. Even losing, a song or two. Remember the war against Franco? 'Though he may have won all the battles / We had all the good songs'

Ah, but that Owen Jones - he does have a way with the handily chosen quote. Owen:

"We can't afford to cock this up this time round," as a young man put it to me in Nottingham.

Sufficiency of opportunity

I've argued before that the concept of equality of opportunity, as generally used, is a misnomer. Equality of opportunity is, at once, 'a worthwhile ideal and an impossible objective' - impossible because, among other reasons, advantages of wealth in one generation get passed on in the next. Mark Harvey and I reiterate the argument in our recent paper 'Marx's economy and beyond' (and see also the excerpt here):

Genuine equality of opportunity – or something approximating it, for perfection in this domain, as in most, is likely to be unattainable – could only be based on a greater equality of condition in the parental generation... and on serious efforts to counteract the disadvantages among its offspring that are passed on willy-nilly.

It does no harm to draw people's attention to a clear restatement of the same point in other terms. Here's Ezra Klein on the subject:

Take equality of opportunity. Everyone in American life professes to believe in equality of opportunity. But nobody really believes in it. Equality of opportunity is often set in opposition to equality of outcome. Communists believe in equality of outcome. Capitalists believe in equality of opportunity.

In truth, equality of opportunity and equality of outcome aren't opposites. They're partners. Companions. Inseparable amigos. You can't have real equality of opportunity without equality of outcome. A rich parent can purchase test prep a poor parent can't. A rich parent can usher their children into social networks a poor parent can't. A rich parent can make donations to Harvard that a poor parent can't.

The inequalities of the parents always and everywhere become the inequalities of the children. As Theodore Dalrymple has written, "true equality of opportunity is unachievable - or could only be achieved through a level of social engineering that would make North Korea look like a paradise of laissez-faire."

When people say they believe in "equality of opportunity," they really mean they believe in "sufficiency of opportunity." They don't believe all children should start from the same place. But they believe all children should start from a good enough place. They believe they should have decent nutrition and functioning schools and a safe community and loving parents. They believe they should have a chance.

Truth less funny than the old joke

It's a joke with which everyone is familiar: that of the prisoner in a Christmas cracker factory. Here's a grimmer version:

The cry for help, a neatly folded letter stuffed inside a package of Halloween decorations sold at Kmart, traveled 5,000 miles from China into the hands of a mother of two in Oregon.

Scrawling in wobbly English on a sheet of onionskin paper, the writer said he was imprisoned at a labor camp in this northeastern Chinese town, where he said inmates toiled seven days a week, their 15-hour days haunted by sadistic guards.

"Sir: If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization," said the note, which was tucked between two ersatz tombstones and fell out when the woman, Julie Keith, opened the box in her living room last October. "Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever."

The letter drew international news media coverage and widespread attention to China's opaque system of "re-education through labor," a collection of penal colonies where petty criminals, religious offenders and critics of the government can be given up to four-year sentences by the police without trial.

According to this report in the New York Times the author of the letter has now come forward. He and others have described 'a catalog of horrific abuse, including frequent beatings, days of sleep deprivation and prisoners chained up in painful positions for weeks on end'. The worst abuses are directed against members of Falun Gong.

An interview with Daniel Libeskind

Daniel Libeskind is an architect and artist of international renown. He has designed buildings and other projects in cities throughout the world: New York and Berlin; Dublin, Denver and Dresden; Copenhagen and Manchester; and many more. Daniel kindly agreed to do this interview for normblog, and I'm honoured to be posting it here today.

1. Your parents were Holocaust survivors. Can you tell us a little about what happened to them and to your wider family during World War II? Do you see any large parental influence on the course of your life and on your artistic work?

My parents lived for the first few months of the war under the Nazi occupation of Poland and then, separately, escaped to Russia. They were immediately arrested; my father sent to work camps on the Volga and my mother to the Gulags of Siberia. When the Russians were forced by the Allies to release the Poles who refused to take Russian citizenship, most Jews, amongst them my parents, fled to remote provinces of the Soviet Union – as far away as possible from the war zone. My parents met in Samarkhan, married, and made their way to Kirgistan, where my sister was born in 1943. At the conclusion of the war in Europe, my parents journeyed by slow train back to Lodz in Poland, having little to no knowledge of what had transpired over the previous three years. I was born in post-war Lodz in 1946. My parents discovered that virtually all of their family had been murdered in the Holocaust.

Growing up in Communist Poland as a Jew, with parents who were not assimilated or Communist, was not easy. And of course, my sister and I had no grandparents, aunts, uncles or cousins. Our life was culturally vibrant but, in terms of extended family, desolate. For sure, this environment had a great influence on both my parents and me. Memory and history formed the basis upon which I thought about architecture and realized architectural projects. When I began to study architecture in New York at the Cooper Union, I realized how important those formative years in Poland were to the outlook and direction of my work.

2. How important to you is your Jewish heritage? Has it had a significant influence on your work?

I have never felt that I could divide who I am from what I do. Those years in Poland, followed by two-plus years in Israel and then New York City, are all framed by Jewish thinking, Jewish tenets and Jewish heritage. I often wonder if there's such a thing as 'Jewish architecture'. The conclusion for me, at least, is that it's not just about a building housing a Jewish organization or synagogue or college with a sign above the door. It is more about how one approaches a project and how to incorporate, within the built form, ideas about remembrance, history, aspirations, optimism and hope. That is why, I guess, many of my buildings are so fully expressive; whether they be cultural, public, residential or commercial ones. Each project site tells a story and even if the history of the ground is not self-evident in its real estate, I try to 'listen' to the site; listen to those who had been there before and listen to those voices that will come after.

3. You have said more than once that a spirit of optimism is essential in creating new buildings. Could you enlarge on that?

By its very nature, architecture is an art of optimism. Music can be written in a minor and melancholic key; writers can write of despair and tragedy; film-makers can produce films which are dark and apocalyptic; but the mere act of constructing a building is one that propels you into a better future. As I draw and sketch, and then see physical models and computer renderings emerge, I am constantly reminded of how consequent every line must be. Before millions of dollars are committed, and years of many people's lives, you have to know, really know, that the building that results from all the money and effort will be worth the investment, will be a source of pride, and will far outlive you. In the end, architecture, in a way, is built on faith.

4. Must there be an ethical dimension in architectural creation, and if so how would you characterize it?

Of course there has to be an ethical dimension – in all areas of life, including one's work - in my case, an architectural practice. I am not a moralist, but I do believe that one has to stand up for what one believes, within a political context. I have chosen to work in certain countries and not in all countries. Personally, I am particularly interested in emerging democracies; those countries which may be struggling, but are nonetheless aspiring to create a society with democracy, liberty and social justice. I would find it very hard to stand up and describe a project and advocate for a project in a country which did not share certain fundamental values which I believe in. That is not to say, of course, that political systems can't change or that any country is perfect. But I think that everyone has a choice that they can make.

The Jewish Museum in Berlin

5. You were trained as a musician. Do you think this has affected your approach to architecture?

I never really thought that I ever left music! Music and architecture are so integrally intertwined; the composition of music has a score with lines and notes which are completely precise. Similarly, architectural drawings are a kind of score with lines and points and openings; these, too, have to be completely precise and accurate. Both music and architecture need a large group to make them possible; to bring music to the ear and architecture to the sky. Architecture is, of course, also sensitive to acoustics and to balance, which, we all know, comes from the inner ear. I have always been intensely interested in the sounds that a site emits. In the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the last Void, which I call the 'Memory Void', was my architectural attempt to complete the music of Arnold Schoenberg's 'Moses and Aaron'. Schoenberg composed this piece while he was still living in Berlin. But then, after his flight from the Nazis and his exile to America, he could not finish the music of the last movement of the opera. So I tried to complete that opera with the music of the footsteps and whispers of those visitors to the Void.

Both architecture and music are arts which, if done properly, should affect one's emotions. Music is totally abstract but what we hear touches not only our intellect but our hearts. Architecture has the opportunity to touch at our spirit and our soul.

6. Is it accurate to describe your work as deconstructivist, and what does this mean to you?

Deconstructivism has a profound meaning in philosophy, literary theory, legal studies and so forth. However, in architecture, although this word has been used in a ground-breaking exhibition in which my work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art, I believe it is not a good term. Deconstructivism implies the taking apart and redistributing of structure, whereas in architecture it is all about construction. The term 'Decontructivism' has to be used with great caution when applied to architecture, and I personally don't feel it's a helpful term. At the same time, deconstructivism opened up the world of architecture to expressive forms. And I am a believer in the expressive.

7. In the light of the Holocaust and other humanly-created catastrophes, isn't the spirit of optimism bound to be qualified?

It is precisely because of the catastrophes that befell the world in the 20th century (of which the Holocaust is surely the culmination) that there has to be a way forward that reaffirms humanity. The 20th century showed the dead ends, which denied the individual, through ideologies of both the left and right. These ideologies dehumanized reality by use of violence to create the future, and created a general loss of liberty in the world. In face of these facts the way forward is to reaffirm the sanctity and humanity of life, which we better appreciate by understanding and never forgetting the realities of the 20th century.

8. You have referred in earlier interviews to the difficulties posed by the project of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Could you say what some of them were?

There were many difficulties posed by creating a Jewish Museum in Berlin. Initially, right after I won the competition, there was opposition; particularly to my design, which was neither sentimental nor nostalgic about a vanished Jewish culture in Berlin. However, the debate which began in Berlin in 1989 and continued until the building was almost finished, was one which dealt with the question of how to address the new capital of Germany, with regard not only to the Holocaust but also to the two-thousand-year-old Jewish history of Germany. There was a point in 1991 where the Senate of Berlin voted unanimously to scrap the project because money was needed for building infrastructure in the now-unified Berlin and for an Olympic bid and so forth. These obstacles to the building of the Jewish Museum were not minor ones and required many debates and worldwide discussion to create a consensus that the Jewish Museum was a key and integral component of developing the German capital of the future.

9. Could you also say something of the difficulties, as you perceived them, of the 9/11 memorial?

At Ground Zero there were initially many different voices: emotional, political, urbanistic, and architectural. Tensions existed between the shareholders, the Port Authority, the developer, the Governors of New York and New Jersey, the Mayor and the families. There were questions about what should be built on the site and how it should be planned. Perhaps the most fundamental difficulty for many was the fact that my master plan left almost half of the Ground Zero site for the memorial and public space, believing that the site was no longer simply a piece of real estate but a place of memory to reflect on the future. This thought had to garner support from many competing factions, who did not see the site in the same way I did. Ultimately, the difficulties were overcome by the master plan in proposing to bridge memory and the future of New York by laying memory foundations. The master plan I believe ultimately presented an exciting future for New York City in a way that also provided a balance between the memorial within a neighbourhood of vitality and optimism.

One of the two memorial pools for 9/11

10. In your TED lecture you say that architecture is the asking of questions. Why is it?

We have seen the positivist and technocratic notions of architecture as an engineering of social reality and the failure of it. Contrary to this I believe architecture, just like science, philosophy and art itself should be directed to ask fundamental questions and refrain from giving false answers. Questions in architecture can be raised in terms of the horizon it offers and the light that befalls it and the connections between past, present and future. In this sense, architecture can become, once again (though always part of technology), the true centre of the humanities.

11. What is your relationship to Israel? Are you hopeful about its future?

I always felt that I was fortunate enough to experience two paradises - Israel and America! I have a very close relationship to Israel. It is still a young country which has faced numerous difficulties in its short existence. However, I am hopeful that this nascent nation, despite its geographic location and problems both internally and externally, will continue to grow and be a positive force for good and democracy in the region.

12. You have spoken on one occasion of the freedom represented by America to everyone in the world. Can you enlarge on this, please – especially in view of the fact that not everyone, I think, would agree with it.

While not everyone may agree, or like American policies, the United States is a country of extraordinary ideals which affirm freedom and liberty.

World Trade Center and Memorial

Dangerous turbans

Here's a local story but one telling of a form of stupidity that is all but universal - and of the proper response to it.

Soccer coach Ihab Leheta sees his role as not only instilling a love for the game in his young protégés, but also teaching them some life lessons - such as speaking out when they witness injustice.

The ban on turbans by the Quebec Soccer Federation, despite medical evidence that they pose no danger and a directive from the Canadian Soccer Association that they be allowed, offered Leheta, who coaches under-14 players in Brossard, such an opportunity.

The QSF move, and a suggestion by its director that Sikh children affected by it play soccer in their backyards, sparked outrage in the province, across the country and abroad.

A city councillor in Montreal plans to present a motion denouncing the federation; "disgusted" parents Donald Pinkerton and Philippa Settels have pulled their 6- and 11-year-old sons from Greenfield Park soccer in protest; and a member of the Sikh community in Switzerland has asked Sepp Blatter, president of Zurich-based FIFA, to intervene. Some of the 13 soccer clubs in the West Island are putting pressure on Lac St-Louis Regional Association to appeal to the QSF to reconsider.

Yet the provincial body appears to have dug in its heels, refusing to respond to questions on the issue and removing contact information about its board of directors from its website.

Saddened by it all, Leheta, 46, decided he couldn't just sit back in silence. He had a chat with his undefeated team last Friday before Saturday's big game against Granby.

"I asked them what was more important than this game," Leheta said Monday in an interview. "One said school, another said family, and then someone said injustice."

Although there are no Sikh boys among the 18 team members, age 14 and under, Leheta asked them what they would do had one of them been excluded because of a turban.

"I told them you can either say: 'It's not my problem,' or you could decide to do something to help out."

With the enthusiastic support of his players and their parents, the coach headed off to the Sikh temple in LaSalle the next morning before the big match and borrowed 20 orange scarves that the boys then donned as turbans at their game in Brossard.

The referee didn't object while doing an equipment check, until he spoke to the coach of the Granby team.

"The ref came back [and] said we couldn't play if we were going to wear the turbans, so I showed him the FIFA rules and he said OK," Leheta said. "But as I shook hands with the Granby coach before the game, he said he thought what we were doing was stupid."

The Brossard team lost 2-1 in the end, but learned an invaluable life lesson, the coach said.

The full story is here. (Thanks: JQ.)

Non-existent norm

This has been the cause of some soul-searching on my part since Sunday (£):

A nonfiction book based on a person who doesn't exist is an unusual sort of work. But that is The Norm Chronicles. "Norm" represents that dream of probability theorists, the absolutely average person slap in the middle of every distribution curve. Unfortunately, as the authors of The Norm Chronicles admit, such a person does not exist, and never will. None of us is exactly average, not even for the age we happen to be at any particular second.

As you can see, I have reasons for concern on more than one count: 'absolutely average' is not very encouraging; but is it worth it if you get chronicled?

Of course, and certainly... except, except, except

Of course we should dedicate significant resources and effort to stopping terrorism... The U.S. should certainly try to prevent terrorist attacks. [Second emphasis added - NG.]

That being Conor Friedersdorf, but with the usual guff about sharks, car accidents, and the death rate from diabetes.

And here, though quite independently of Friedersdorf, is Dan Hodges explaining the logic of those who oppose terrorism while also opposing every single measure designed to combat it.