Robert Sharp

The use of a Nativity scene on the CRE’s Christmas Card is an interesting and contemporary choice. It is at this time of the year, every year, that the ‘Political Correctness’ phoenix rears its ugly head, and indeed Jamie Doward’s article about the card in The Observer veers onto precisely that reserve. We hear from the Archbishop of York, who complains that “crib is in danger of being thrown out of Christmas” and it is secularists who are being blamed for this decline. On Saturday, The Daily Mail found that only 3% of Christmas cards now carry a ‘traditional’ message - that is, some depcition of the Christian Nativity:

Religious groups and MPs last night warned that the multi-million pound Christmas card industry was losing sight of the real reason for celebrating the festive period. … Conservative MP Philip Davies said card manufacturers who ditched Christmas symbols were falling victim to “politically correct madness”.

No. It is the MPs who are falling victim to the propaganda put out by the religious groups. In fact, it is the Christian establishment who are peddling the politically correct line here. And, just like the worst examples of ‘PC gone mad’ which infuriates so many people, they frame themselves as the victims of prejudice. Then they demand everyone else make changes to fit their (Christian) agenda.

And so we endure this sanctimonious talk about Christmas, and its “true meaning”. The complainers forget that a Winter Festival long pre-dates the celebration of Christ’s birth. There were pagan, ‘Yuletide’ festivals held in the winter anyway. Indeed, a feast period during the coldest days of the year is hardly an innovation unique to the followers of the Nazarene! I tell you what: If I was the founding father of some cult or culture, then I reckon this month would be ideal for a festival of some sort. Now is the perfectly logical time to take stock of the year gone by, (and in agricultural communities, literally ‘take stock’), make plans and resolutions for the year to come, and, with my family, welcome the light and prosperity promised by spring.

And, Lo! In this age of technology, mass communication and commercialisation, this is precisely what we do. For all the whines about us ignoring that Bethlehem story, we still see most people in this country spending time with their family, feasting, and spending some of the hard earned fruits of their labour. Sure, in pagan times, these were actual fruits and other farm produce. That in today’s world, the fruits happen to take the form of, say, a Nintendo Wii is, I think, merely a matter of detail… I wish people would stop forcing upon us the lie that this is, in itself, a bad thing.

We should remember that for the past thousand years or so, the dominant religion has succeeded in labelling “The Winter Festival” with the brand-name “Christmas”. On the surface, the focus was narrowed to just the Nativity… but all the while, up-and-down the continent, ordinary people also retained the wider traditions of family, feasting, and welcoming the new season. Festivals can and do have more than one meaning.

In the twenty-first century, we see the older meanings bubble back up to the surface. Some will sneer, and label these values ’secularist’; I call these values simply ‘human’ and inclusive. The pious, exclusive dogma is marginalised. No wonder those who see their power, influence and world-view on the wane are beginning to complain. Their own re-branding excercise, imposed by the Christian Roman Emperors, is now being reversed, and “Christmas” once again becomes “Winter Festival”.

It is nevertheless ironic that they complain about this. By lobbying to retain the Christian label for what has clearly become a secular festival, it is Christianity that is undermined. “Christ Mass” is obviously a word invented by Christians, with a specific meaning. If people really want to celebrate this ‘true’ meaning (i.e. The Birth of their Saviour, Jesus Christ) then perhaps they should do so on December 7th, along with their friends in the Orthodox Church. Free of the guilt that their chosen religion inexplicably ladles onto their heads, they could then celebrate a more generic festive season on 25th December with the rest of us.

Adherents of minority religions have been doing this for centuries. Jewish people celebrate Hannukah at some point in December (this year, I believe it begins this Saturday, 16th December). This observance does not stop them enjoying the festive season with the rest of us, indulging in an excessive feast just like everyone else. They do not winge that their neighbours’ conception of this time of year might be diffferent from theirs.

So, it is actually all these MPs, Bishops, and Stephen Greens who miss the point of these imminent celebrations. Worse, they seek to hi-jack it, by trying to define for everyone else what the winter festival is for. This impedes and bores the rest of us, who are just trying to have a bit of fun with our family and friends.

Update: Pickled Politics points out a couple of good links on this subject. Oliver Burkeman at The Guardian explodes the ‘War on Christmas’ myth, while Wordblog says that the shrill campaigns for Christmas fosters division and Islamophobia at a time that is supposed to mean ‘goodwill to all men’…

From UKIP Home:

It’s well known that you should not create a political frame that creates a positive view of your opposition.

For example, no political leader would ever publicly say they believe their rivals will win even if the rival has 60% poll share rating.

The reason is obvious; by stating the possibility of your rival winning, you add strength to that frame because you do not want it to happen.

Yes, yes, a well known Machiavellian strategy. But one that is also highly irritating and patronising to the average punter. We voters know very well how the opinion polls rate the parties; and we are no less able than a politician to understand, say, concepts of percentage swing. When one party is massively ahead of the other in the polls, denial is just stupid. No-one wants an ostritch as their representative.

Why do politicians believe that denying the obvious somehow wins them votes? How about trying to win votes by the power of argument, rather losing votes with these school-boy mind-tricks?

Overheard at a house-warming party:

Drunk blogger: Well, I’ve been called an ‘Islamophobe’ and an ‘anti-semite’ on my blog, so…

Drunk non-blogger: … you’re just the bigot in the middle?

The fallacy of the blogger here, of course, is to assume that the two positions attributed to him are mutally exclusive, and therefore cancel each other out. This is not the case at all, as his respondent was so quick to point out.

Its an extension of that argument which says that if you are against position x (say, the invasion of Iraq) you are necessarily supportive of position y (the regime of Saddam), which doesn’t quite capture the true nature of the situation. The fallacy begins when we assume that these arguments are binary, zero-sum problems. Our politicians (supported by their cohorts in the media) are very good at promoting these falsehoods. “You’re either with us or against us”. Buy into the way they have framed the debate, and your argument is already lost.

And yes, dear reader: I was that blogger.

Here is one such thought that I’ve been pondering for a week or so. Someone posted this comment:

Human nature and with it the need to marginalise, insult and bully people belonging to other groups, never changes…

I hear this a lot, usually (I have to say) cited as a reason for not bothering to support charitable causes and group endevours; or as an excuse for some tribalistic rejection of some other group. For too many people, citing the selfish aspect of human nature is the end of the conversation, a put-down to all the idealistic talk about equality.

And for me, it is this attitude which grates. I am sure humans have selfish side, but I am not so confident that this part of our nature trumps all our other qualities! Either way, I think this fact should be the start of the conversation: How do we work to overcome these urges? How do we achieve something greater together, than we could do alone?

A full schedule for a lot of people today, it seems.

Sunny Hundal of Pickled Politics is going to begin a media blitz today, with an article in the Guardian and some radio appearances, promoting his New Generation Network.

Edinburgh blogger Devil’s Kitchen is making an appearance on 18 Doughty Street today too.

Finally, the BBC Asian Network Report will be airing a documentary Sex, Lies, and Culture, co-produced by the BBC and myself for Fifty Nine:

Are young Asians taking unnecessary risks with their sexual health? Brook Advisory Services, the national sexual health charity, are calling for further investigation into worrying information about Asians visiting their Birmingham clinic. They found higher proportions of Asians were likely to have unprotected sex, and to request emergency contraception, pregnancy testing and referrals for an abortion. They were also less likely to be tested for sexually transmitted infections. The Birmingham clinic saw aImost 4, 500 Asians under 25 years old last year, fewer than other ethnic groups. In Sex, Lies and Culture Anita Rani investigates whether the strict attitudes of older Asians has created a generation which isn’t informed about safe sex.

There should be some media coverage of those issues on the BBC 6 o’clock News, and also in The Times.

More soon…

I’ve been reading a lot of Andrew Sullivan’s blog recently. He’s been plugging his new book, The Conservative Soul, and writing a great deal about how doubt is the essence of conservativism, as he sees it. By contrast, he says, much of right-wing politics in the USA has an Evangelical hue, and the certainty of the Christianist zealots is not actually very conservative at all.

This take has attracted many critics, including Jonah Goldberg at the National Review (which I came upon via Reason Magazine):

The fact that evil is rarely defeated by people who are unsure they are right is lost on Sullivan.

I disagree. Just because you are unsure whether you are right, it does not mean you cannot be sure that other people are wrong! You only really need confidence in the latter premise, to make a stand against evil.

I see that another gay rights march in Jerusalem has been given the go ahead.

Earlier this year, a planned World Pride march in Jerusalem was cancelled, due to massive opposition from both Jewish and Muslim groups.

My feeling was that Jerusalem could be a beacon of multiculturalism, and a World Pride march there could be a positive example for the future. The Intifada Kid begged to differ:

I disagree that holding this in Jerusalem, the Eastern part of which has been occupied by Israel since 1967, should be a cause for celebration. There is a growing movement against this idea, supported by progressive and informed activists for sexual rights based locally and globally. See: boycottworldpride.org.

I can understand how a boycotting of the march would follow from the idea of boycotting Israeli goods and travel to Israel in general, as a means of peaceful protest against the illegal occupation of Palestine. However, I wonder if larger (or, at least different) ideas are at work here, and whether an exception could have been made.

The acceptance of homosexuality is an anathema to all the Abrahamic religions, and the fundamentalists who seek to impose their world-view on others. Surely, therefore, the World Pride March acts in opposition to these people.

So, in reply to the Intifada Kid: Is an acceptance of homosexuality compatible with Zionism? If not, then allowing gays into Jerusalem would radically undermine that Zionism, no? Would World Pride in Jerusalem not be a temporary ‘liberation’ of the city?

(I supposed this argument could be reversed for the other side of the argument. If Islamic fundamentalists were the cause of the impasse, then a gay pride march undermines them, too. Of course, all this depends on an analysis of the conflict in religious terms, which is not a given by any means).

Not that any of this matters, really. As mentioned, the World Pride march in August never went ahead, and was replaced by a protest instead. That, in turn, was drowned out by the nasty conflict in Lebanon.

At The Sharpener, Sunny dissects the issues surrounding Jack Straw’s comments that Muslim women should not wear the full veil (niqab).

George Galloway’s suggests that women are being asked to “disrobe.” (via PP) I know there is a relativism to all of this, but I simply cannot get past the notion that a person’s face is essential to the way they communicate, in a way that their breasts, buttocks, or indeed hair, simply are not.

Furthermore - who is relative to who? I’ve dug up an interesting article by Matthew Parris from last year, where he declares

Never mind what the woman thinks, wearing a veil is offensive to me

I have a similar feeling. I say to these women: Why do you deny me your smile? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

Late last month, the US Congress approved a bill which would give the President power to ‘reinterpret’ the Geneva Convention with regards to the treatment of detained foreign terror suspects, and authorise interrogation techniques that the convention declares illegal. In the past few days, I have been pondering the implications of this, and the wider moral debate about whether we can, in some circumstances, justify torture.

I wrote last year that I thought that the “‘ticking bomb scenario’ is an unhelpful hypothetical construct.” Clive Davis resurrects this argument with a pertinent, real life scenario from Mark Bowden, at a Carnegie Council symposium:

There was an article in The New York Times about a crime in Germany where a kidnapper had taken a 12-year old boy, and had buried him alive. He went to collect the ransom, and was caught. He was in custody, and refused to tell the police where he had buried the child. The police chief in this case threatened the kidnapper with torture, and he promptly told him where he buried the boy.

A powerful story indeed. However, what Clive doesn’t quote is the insight from the director of B’Tselem, who Bowden mentions later in the symposium. She said she would torture… but expect to be prosecuted for it:

But it has to be that I broke the law. It can’t be that there’s some prior license to abuse people.

I think we should call this the McClane Mitigation. No, that is not a mis-spelling of ‘McCain’, as in Senator John McCain (R-AZ), the presidential hopeful who was tortured in Vietnam. I do mean John McClane, the maverick cop from the Die Hard movies. The Bruce Willis character is the epitome of that brand of fictional policeman, who perpetually have to circumvent normal procedure, in order to stop some catastrophe or other. They of course gets an earful from their superiors, and we assume (though never see) some kind of post-credit inquiry, in which the transgressions are investigated and accounted for. Laws that most certainly have been broken, but the urgency of the situation, and actual lives saved, are taken in mitigation during sentencing. The jury convicts, but the judge is lenient, and some form of justice is served.

But even this is a slippery slope. The ‘ticking bomb’ could first be defined as a long-term threat to national security. “We might prevent another 9/11″ becomes a catch-all excuse for routine torture. What a wonderful legacy for the victims.

There are several other moral objections to the tack taken by President Bush and his supporters. The first is the explicit xenophobia which runs through the legislation. It only applys to non-US citizens… which does beg the question of what would happen if an American were arrested on suspicion of terrorism. Ticking bombs don’t have nationalities.

When we make laws (and indeed, provide services), we expect them to be carried out uniformly throughout the land. This is not possible in the case of torture. The final problem with the scenario as outlined by Bowden, concerns the unreliability of the agent of torture. In his example (above), it was fortuitious that the policeman in question had the nerve to threaten torture at all (it was also lucky that it appears he did not actually have to carry through with his threats, but that is beside the point here). Torture, we are told, dehumanises everyone involved. What if a person, who finds themselves obliged to torture, discovers that they do not have the stomach for it? I forsee a situation where they are sued by the families of victims, on the basis that they did not do whatever was necessary to prevent the tradgey.

We are reassured that torture would be permissible in limited, unusual circumstances. But it is probable that in these same circumstances, those tasked with inflicting pain will have done nothing like it before! There would have to be guidelines, and we would have to endure a sickening public debate over what exactly was allowed (the euphemism-heavy debate in the US is already pretty horrible). Do they try the classic ‘electrodes to testicles’? At what amperage? Or should they opt for the more retro ‘removal of toenails’? What if the pliers are not available? With the state of UK public services as they are, it would be worse still, with the Right Hon. Dr John Reid MP having to declare Britains torture facilities “unfit for purpose”.

Over at Samizdata, James Waterton highlights this quote from ExxonMobil, apparently rubbishing the recieved wisdom that our oil reserves will run out soon:

According to the US Geological Survey, the earth currently has more than three trillion barrels of conventional recoverable oil resources. So far, we have produced one trillion of that.

According to James, oil companies tend to under-estimate the amount of crude-oil resources, because they have “natural interest in maintaining a perception of scarcity”. I think that is half the argument: They also have an interest in maintaining a perception of having a viable business model, and that surely depends on there being plenty of oil to extract, no?

A hat-tip to Devil’s Kitchen, who thinks our worries over Peak Oil are a red herring:

We need to wean ourselves off the oil as fast as possible in order to negate the stranglehold that the dictators in the Middle East have over us.

True, but I think even this still misses the point.

Forget global warming, forget the mathematical fact of finite resources, forget middle-eastern politics. Burning fossil fuels is, well, like… minging. Any cyclist who has stopped at traffic-lights behind a bus will attest to this objective fact. The buildings in our cities - all human cities - are stained black with the residue of this continuous combustion.

I read a lot of indignant prose from both environmental campaigners who complain about the lack of urgency at combatting global warming; and from climate change deniers who resist these apparently fascist demands on their freedom and their lifestyle. Let me remind everyone of the facts: We set fire to chemicals and make everything just a little bit smellier, dirtier, and more carcinogenic to every living thing than it was the day before (we don’t even have the decency to add any nicotine to the mixture). I maintain that no-one, whether they are part of this species or another, thinks this is pleasant. The picture is already preposterous enough, without adding global climate change into the mix.

Since industry uses so much fuel to power the economy, an instant change is unlikely. Nevertheless, vast chunks of our daily lives that could be powered by renewable sources. The ’standby’ indicator light on my DVD player could be kept glowing by a hamster and a wheel, so I feel sure that A Drop Of Golden Sun could do it too. Why not leave the argument about whether solar and wind can actually power our entire lifestyles, for the day when we have a wind-mill and solar-panel in everyone’s back yard? Purely in terms of smell I would rather have a spoilt view, than a cloud of carbon monoxide haze, and I say that before I count the extra change in my pocket, and before my government realises it no longer has to be nice to Wahhabists.

Finally: Let us remember that having only a couple of trillion barrels of oil in reserve is still a crisis for humanity. Some of us are still holding out hope for the colonisation of other planets in the solar system (and beyond), and we need all the resources we can find.

Stop using our precious fossil fuels for your Land Rover! I need it for my space-ship.