Ever since Tory Convert last week attempted to explain her political philosophy, I’ve been mulling over how I would answer the same question.
Then I realised I did not have to, and probably could not do so anyway. Personal philosophies are slippery things that change with every new conversation you have and every article you read. They are also both complicated and subtle (or they should be), and attempting to explain it in a single article is always going to be impossible. You need at least a book.
A cartoon that appeared in The Spectator a couple of months ago has two guys talking at a cocktail party. One says: “I thought I had a book inside me, turns out it was only a blog.” This week I have endured two instances of friends laughing in derison, when they heard I’ve been writing a blog. They assumed I was writing about what I had for dinner, and what I watched on TV. I explained that blogs are scrap-books where people paste their thoughts and findings. Mine is not really a diary, but is becoming a place where I store my own thoughts, and those of others. If anyone asked me to explain my political philosophy, I would give them my URL, and tell them to get reading.
Month: December 2005 (Page 2 of 3)
A perpetual debate rages over the role of women in Islam. The extreme Wahhabism practiced in Saudi Arabia is held as an example of the faith’s essential sexism, as evidenced by the state’s insistence that women cover themselves in public. Moderate Muslims argue that proponents of Wahhabism and Sharia law should not be taken to speak for all Islam, which I agree with. They also argue that the veil is not necessarily oppressive, a point on which I am not so sure.
Commenting for the BBC’s From Our Own Correspondent on the slow pace of change in Saudi, Gerald Butt discusses that other well known ‘test case’, the fact that Saudi women are not allowed to drive. Apparently, King Abdullah has contributed to a debate by saying that one day, this may change.
A member of the all-male Majlis al-Shura – the 150-seat unelected consultative council – caused something of a rumpus. Muhammad al-Zulfa pointed out there was nothing under Islam or the constitution that justified the ban on women driving, and the council should discuss ways of lifting it.
A heated debate ensued. Even King Abdullah found himself involved. In response to a question on American television, he said he thought a day would eventually come when Saudi women could drive.
While this is welcome, I cannot help thinking that they seem to have their priorities wrong. As a caption in Butt’s article reminds us, Saudi women cannot vote. This undermines all of Islam, demeans women, and offends everyone. Driving licences can wait – there’s only one important right that Saudi women need. Once they have the vote, perhaps they can decide for themselves whether or not they need to drive…
Isn’t it funny how everyone, everywhere thinks their culture is under attack, eh? The Islamic States fear the coming of Western Imperialism, while the Christian West complains that their time-honoured traditions are being undermined by an unjustified favouritism to alien minorities. (via CY).
I suggest this is because people know their own culture, with all its nuances and foibles, better than any other (indeed, that’s true almost by definition). They also see competing cultures as monoliths that could not fail to obliterate their own creed and traditions, given half the chance. They see themselves as the quaint corner shop, battling against a rampaging Tesco. For them, the idea of multiculturalism is an anathema. It opens up your precious culture – your soul! – to a barrage of attack.
Andrew Neil has some bad news for these people. Unfortunately, it seems the global economy we have made for ourselves has already ripped open our culture for all to attack. Our way of life is left as bare and as vulnerable to market forces as a independent high-street shop.
This week The Business publishes Neil’s lecture What China can teach the West. He says that Europe, Britain included, has a myopic and stagnant attitude to governance and economics. This will result in Europe being eclipsed by Asia, not only in the realm of economics, but of education and culture too.
It was Neil’s commentary on Hayek’s “evolutionary rationalism” that caught my eye. Institutions, especially governments and economic systems, should not be a product of deliberate design. Instead, systems should follow an evolutionary path, the product of countless human decisions. A free-market, left to its own accord.
Though Hayek clearly preferred evolution and the market to revolution and central planning, he was not a small-c conservative … [He] had no truck with those who sought to preserve the status quo, existing hierarchies or to block change. He supported the market for the very reason that it is disruptive; he relished Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”.
Neil’s implication is that economic and cultural influence are intertwined. Only the briefest glance towards the USA is enough to convince most people on this point. So presumably, these economic ideas can be applied to cultures too. In this sense, we can define multiculturalism as ‘the cultural marketplace’, a willfull encouragement of healthy competition. Give individuals a free set of alternative choices, and they will make their cultural and even ethical decisions. The societies and cultures to which they belong will mutate a little.
Should we be concerned that cultures are open to unfetterted attack from the marketplace? If you are confident in your culture, then there is no need to worry. It is a strong product and the marketplace will reward you with a thousand years of prosperity. But if your culture is weak, it will need to change in order to survive. Protectionism and regulation will not work, Hayek would say. Your culture will stagnate and adherents will fall by the wayside.
Concerned that your daughter is offending your family honour by having a boyfriend? (via DK). Well, change your honour system, because it’s not testing well with the target market. Bothered that people are forgetting the true meaning of Christmas? Why not simply change the meaning of Christmas, to pull in the faithful? Better still, consider a merger. Take the best bits from both cultures, and sack any superfluous traditions that are holding you back.
Update: Over at The Thames, Jenks considers how our global business culture is developing. Considering how people choose to do business is a welcome bridge between the economic evolution proposed by Hayek, and and the cultural evolution I’ve been pondering here. Meanwhile at Pickled Politics, a debate rages about who, exactly, are the victims in the race riots that have plagued Sydney this week.
My girlfriend suspects I am having an affair.
She thinks this, because she often walks in when I am typing messages to someone called Sunny. While this mysterious character will no doubt be flattered by the implication, its not him I’m obsessed with, just his RSS feed. His, and those belonging to about thirty other people too.
When I mentioned in August that I would be inaugurating a blog (or a “blog” as I would have called it then), my girlfriend was slightly offended. Why communicate online when there is a whole city of real people to talk to? Why sacrifice human contact, and body language, to have a debate with someone you will never meet, never see, never know? My response was to reassure her that I was not seeking to replace proper conversations. I pointed out that we gravitate towards people with similar opinions and outlook, and it would be a tragedy if there were friends of mine I hadn’t met yet. Through the Internet I could find them, even if by some ridiculous mistake of fortune they happened to live in Nebraska. Using my website to broadcast my thoughts into the ether, I too would be famous for fifteen people.
The stigma associated with meeting people online (for debate, love, or friendship) reduces every day, but I don’t believe the Internet presents a threat to offline, non-virtual (i.e. real) interaction. Over at The Triforce, where the authors are famous for fifty people apparently, Ste Curran tells us why Internet communities are better in the flesh:
Meeting someone online is a bit like telling a ghost story. It is meant to be real, but all parties involved should know it is also essentially fictional. Everything you read on a forum, in an IM, in an email; each of these fragmented bursts of data, or microscopic-essays, or simple streams of consciousness; each of them is a representation of a single instant in someone’s life. The person producing them is communicating by sending a series of snapshots of themselves, and stringing together those snapshots misses out a big piece of what makes them them.
…
So the signature, the avatar, the email address you hold up as this person is not quite the same as firstname lastname behind the keyboard. It’s not they’re picking themselves out as something else with objective cynicism … The person you’re typing to is the tone of their voice, the way their eyes dart, the way their clothes fall, that fractional gasp when they’re surprised. It is in everything they don’t know about themselves.
Again, because that is super important: they are not hiding. Anything but. Something about the internet means people are more free with their conversation there than they might be if they’d known you for months in real life. They are telling you things in private they haven’t told their best friends. Even forums where you talk about nothing bring you so close. Read between the lines in the nonsense and you can build up incredibly detailed internal profiles of your online friends. You’ll still never really know them until the moment you touch.
To be honest, I’m rather wary of quoting a whole three paragraphs of Triforce material. Since I have met them online and in person, I can tell you with authority that fuelling their egos further is probably not a good idea. So no-one tell them, OK?
Common sense and decency prevails, as the House of Lords rules that evidence gained through torture cannot be used in court.
Lord Carswell
The duty not to countenance the use of torture by admission of evidence so obtained in judicial proceedings must be regarded as paramount and that to allow its admission would shock the conscience, abuse or degrade the proceedings and involve the state in moral defilement
The ineffectiveness of torture as a tool for anything has been well argued… but a couple of quick observations. First, the “ticking bomb scenario” is an unhelpful hypothetical construct. As David Luban says in the Washington Post, we give it credence only because we see so many examples of it in Hollywood. (via Clive). If it gets to the stage where a bomb is about to go off, and the only way we can discover it is by electrocuting a terrorists testicles… then I would say we’re already pretty much fucked anyway.
The other problem with the “ticking bomb” hypothetical is that it ignores the sheer amount of time and effort that goes into torturing people. If the CIA really are scheduling flights across the atlantic in order to torture their prisoners, then their intelligence gathering is clearly not being done with any sense of urgency.
Update: The New Republic carries Andrew Sullivan’s fantastic article against torture, a response to Charles Krauthammer’s apology for it. Over at Great Britain, Not Little England, there are links to further discussion, referencing Craig Murray and the Uzbekistani example.