An interesting task

Posted on February 12, 2006 by acb

Two projects for next month: I will make another Analysis programme on what the government’s policy towards domestic Islamic terrorism actually is; and I will produce a longish essay for the Guardian looking at whether it is true – as alleged by Bruce Anderson, amongst others – that real scholars are now frightened to discuss truthfully the origins of Islam.

On the Analysis question, it seems to me quite clear what we should be trying to avoid. The worst possible case for the British government – and society’s – point of view, is for the development of Islamic terrorism to follow the path of Irish Catholic nationalism in Ulster, with clan-based mafias with external safe havens and funding, a fascist ideology, and a religious penumbra setting up as the defenders of their people against an external threat. It’s very much easier to start such things than to stop them; it is also the case that once they get started, they are largely self-sustaining. The threat to all Muslims will become more real in proportion to the ways in which some Muslims threaten the rest of us. These are hardly original thoughts but I need to find the people in government or thereabouts who have been thinking them and will talk honestly.

As the for question of fear, I know that I have been frightened in the past myself. I did a long piece for the Sunday Telegraph some years ago about the oldest known fragments of the Koran, which Dominic Lawson spiked. I haven’t busted a gut to publish it since. But I now think this was wrong. There is a hugely important principle at stake. Censoring universities is much more important than censoring newspapers. We shall see what happens when I start asking questions.

Finally – what is there in common between celebrity and sacredness? They do seem to me to involve very similar psychic mechanisms, a kind of child-like magical thinking. There was a story in the Observer today about Jordan’s enormous book sales, and a woman queuing for her signature was quoted as saying that she had been through so much, so that when she, the fan, realised that Jordan had been a single parent this gave her the strength to be one too. And this kind of identification with an idealised but really powerful figure, who is just like us, only perfect, is clearly at the root of a lot of attitudes to both Jesus and Muhammed.

PS — Aaaaaaaargh!

Posted in Journalism | 2 Comments

ungrateful

Posted on February 8, 2006 by acb

Every six months or so I think that I must get a download from the Grateful Dead music store; it takes about that long to forget how awful the system is. They have a site which doesn’t work with firefox at all, and where the button to download all the tracks you have bought (one easy click on emusic) will only work in IE. Or so they say; it won’t work in IE for me either. So I end up right-clicking on every track in Opera and saving as.

Last time I did this was January the fourth. Halfway through the ineffable frustration of downloading sixteen copies of a file called “bigriver.aspx” which contains no music at all, I fired off an email of complaint to the help desk. Today, February 8, I got a reply, which started with the phrase “You have recently” … stoned inefficiency combined with arrogance and robotic inflexibility. How very 1980s Dead.

Posted in Blather | 10 Comments

Expert Advice

Posted on February 6, 2006 by acb

I was much struck by the Telegraph’s explanation, in its leader today, of why we are having problems with Muslims:

After all, the question of whether it is possible to be a good British Muslim is not a new one. Hundreds of millions of Muslims lived peacefully under the British Crown, in India, Sudan, Malaya and elsewhere. They saw no conflict between their faith and their civic loyalty, fighting for Britain even when we went to war against the Ottoman Caliph. The difference is that, in those days, we had confidence in ourselves, and conveyed this confidence to others.

If only I had known that the world was so simple! I decided to find other pearls from the Telegraph leader writers’ advice on Muslims. Just from the leaders published in 2002 and 2003 I learned an enormous amount. So much that I can’t fit it on this page — in fact I can’t even fit it into this universe, but have managed to link the extended entry into Planet Telegraph. I have italicised the most prophetic passages. Enjoy.

Continue reading →

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Sheep and goats

Posted on February 6, 2006 by acb

Some time in the early 1980s I was sitting in a taxi with Peter Utley, then deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph, talking about the next election and the prospect that Margaret Thatcher might lose it. “That’s all right” said the biographer of Enoch Powell. “If it ever looks dangerous, all she has to do is to make a speech linking immigration with unemployment.”

This was a man who would have protested that he sincerely loathed fascism. He would never have dreamt of voting for the fascist British National Party. But he took for granted that the deep instincts of the British working class were xenophobic.

Last week the chairman of the BNP was acquitted by a jury in Yorkshire on charges of incitement to racial hatred, after he called Islam a “vicious, wicked faith”; compared asylum seekers to cockroaches, and said that “decent working people in West Yorkshire … are facing terrible problems, including the grooming of their children by racist paedophiles from part of the Muslim community.”

If this is not speech calculated to stir up racial hatred — and Mr Griffin, a Cambridge graduate, is no stranger to calculation — I can’t imagine what is. There’s no question that he said these things. They were all caught on tape. So the refusal of a jury to convict him suggests that such hatred is widespread in some parts of the country, and that the legislation to control it has stopped working.

The traditional left response to the BNP was to get out on the streets and fight them. The traditional response of the Right was to appropriate enough of their language to get their votes, while excluding them from any real power. This morning, in the Independent, the Conservative commentator Bruce Anderson writes “A lot of soggy liberals now believe that if no one talked about the problem it would just go away. Every day, people who used to think like that arrive, at last, in cancer specialists’ waiting rooms. In Christian -Muslim relations, such delay could be equally fatal”

Anderson is not just a thoroughly unpleasant1 man whose hiring by the Independent was a great stroke: there is no one better calculated to upset Liberal prejudices. He is also gifted with an organ whose workings modern science cannot explain — a nose uniquely adapted to fit between the haemorrhoids of each and every leader of the Conservative party. No matter who may have the job this year, Anderson’s ability to discern and praise his merits is matched only by the mercilessly clear-sighted anatomisation of all his predecessor’s faults and follies.

If such a man is starting to compare British Muslims to a cancer, we can be sure that a large proportion of the Conservative party feels that way; and if the BNP does well in the next election, and Cameron does badly, we will be in for interestingly unpleasant times.

1 My only clear memory of him comes from about the time of the conversation with Peter Utley. Anderson was in the Duke of York, the pub opposite the Spectator, though he was then a television producer. In the course of a discussion about Iran, he suggested infecting a flock of sheep with Aids and driving it over the border from some neighbouring country, in order to spread the disease. This was of course meant as a joke, though not a particularly funny one. The point was really to express his utter contempt for the people he was discussing.

Posted in British politics | 1 Comment

Modern Art: a cautionary tale

Posted on February 4, 2006 by acb

There is an abstract artist living up the road who has sold one of his paintings to Cambridge University Press, which is using it as the cover for Noam Chomsky’s next book. I can’t be sure, but from the web site, I think it must be this. The artist was delighted, but pointed out that Chomsky had got the picture upside down. If that’s the way Professor Chomsky wants it, that’s how the book will be, replied the publishers. I only wish that Larry Trask were still alive to appreciate the story.

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Dirty realism

Posted on February 3, 2006 by acb

A wonderful, grindingly sad story in this week’s New Yorker about teenage mothers in Louisiana. It’s not online — though well worth the cost of the print magazine — but there is an interview with the author on the web site.

One heart-breaking vignette among many: Luwana is the nurse, Alexis an eighteen-year-old mother.

Alexis lived with her mother and father, a grocery clerk and a construction worker who were in constant conflict. When Alexis was eight months pregnant, the fights grew so fierce that she fled the household altogether. Her recent return testified less to domestic reconciliation than to the impact that a squalling baby has on the sleepover invitations a girl receives.

As Luwana tried to draw Alexis out, the phone rang, and Alexis covered her ears. "I’m guessing this is Daigan’s dad who keeps on calling," Luwana said, after the third round of unanswered rings. Alexis met her eyes for an instant, then burst into tears. "O.K., now," the nurse said, "spell it out for Miss Luwana."
Between sniffles, the proximate cause of distress became clear. Daigan’s father, a sturdy twenty-six-year-old named James, worked on a tugboat on the Mississippi River. That weekend, he would be returning to shore and expected to have sex with Alexis, though she was not healed from childbirth, nor was she using contraception.

"No way!" Luwana said. "Keep your legs closed: embed that in your brain. Tell him to keep his hands to himself. And if you can’t stand up for yourself, stand up for Daigan. You’ve got a lot of work ahead, giving him what he needs. Look around, Alexis. You need another baby in this picture?"
"No," Alexis said dully. Then she brightened: "Miss Luwana, maybe you can write me an excuse note, like for gym?"

It makes an interesting footnote to all those Katrina stories that Luwana, the nurse, is black and her clients white.

Posted in Journalism | 1 Comment

God hates cockroaches

Posted on February 2, 2006 by acb

and the proof, via Carl Zimmer is in some research in the Journal of Neurobiology. They want $25 to read it, so I am relying on Zimmer’s summary here. There is a species of wasp, Ampulex compressa, which lays its eggs in cockroaches. So far, nothing unusual. There are several species of wasp which paralyse their prey before planting eggs in them. But this wasp merely zombifies its victim cockroach: in the language of the paper The wasp Ampulex compressa injects a cocktail of neurotoxins into the brain of its cockroach prey to induce an enduring change in the execution of locomotory behaviors. It stings it precisely in the head in such a way as to abolish its fear reflex. Somehow the sting contains a venom which renders the cockroach completely docile, if rather sluggish.

The stung and zombified cockroach can then walk on its own legs, tugged by the wasp that pulls at its antenna, into the wasp’s burrow, where it is immured for the little baby waspling to burrow into and devour alive in the normal way.

The scientists involved have been looking at cockroach neurons to find out how the neurotoxins work, but when I think about the story,. what I find most remarkable is the wasp’s behaviour. How are those instructions stored in its tiny brain?

Posted in Science without worms | 7 Comments

The sacred and the local

Posted on February 1, 2006 by acb

Just a quick thought on the JyllandsPosten cartoons: if religion is related to morality, then sacred symbols have to be local at least to a particular community. The sacred, in this sense, which I found in David Sloan Wilson, is distinct from the numinous, which I find in the world around me, as does everyone. But most people find it in different places from me, and where I find it varies over time. The sacred symbol, by contrast, is fixed and always sacred and hedged about with taboos.

DSW would say that this is because the sacred must be lifted above all ordinary social and negotiable relationships if it is to function. It is a kind of imperative. It ends argument, as the Supreme Court is supposed to do. But this is itself a social funciton of course. The sacred functions within particular communities. Thus, the urge to spit in Mohammed’s eye is a declaration that we don’t want to be bound by the laws of Islam, an essentially political statement. (Nice irony that it turns out that even secular societies cannot disentangle politics from religion in some contexts)

If the sacred is a mechanis by which a community understads its own morality, then the horror of blasphemy becomes a little clearer. Since altuistice behavrious is always vulnerable to defectors and cheats, they have to be stamped out. Altruism, in this context, always applies within a group. Hence the intuition that morality must be absolute if it is to be valid. Blasphemy is a declaration that the blasphemer is — in game theory — a defector, a cheat, someone who won’t play by the rules that constitute society. The only way out of this bind is to find some larger, common loyalty, something which is left as an exercise for the reader.

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Still not making sense

Posted on February 1, 2006 by acb

Some random thoughts from the newspapers:

  • Bush demanding energy independence by 2025 is Jimmy Carter repeating himself as farce. Remember that Carter’s reaction to the Iranian revolution in 1979 was to set out a concrete programme to get America weaned off Middle Eastern oil: “The moral aquivalent of war”, he called it. Reagan wiped the floor with him. Now Bush says the same thing is desirable. (Technically, he says that it will happen, but we know that’s not true and wouldn’t be true even if he meant it to happen). In its pathetic way, it is a clear admission of the utter bankruptcy of the policies that led them into Iraq.
  • Am I alone in thinking that far too much fuss is being made about the hundredth dead British soldier? This is a wicked and stupid war; but a war in which only 100 soldiers are killed over nearly three years is not the worst thing that could happen to the British army.
  • Big Guardian reorganisation makes it looks as if there will be another concerted effort to improve the web site, which should be fun, especially since the site is pretty damn good already. There is nothing quite like the smugness of people who used to work on the Independent and now find themselves at the Guardian.
  • Small logic problem: Jyllandsposten publishes a cartoon of Mohammed wearing a bomb for a turban. Muslims so outraged by this caricature that they threaten to bomb the paper. Actually, of course, the story is much more complex and interesting. It is not Danish muslims who are still outraged. They seem to have accepted their apology. It’s not clear to me whether the settlement is on the basis that it is wrong to publish insulting pictures of the prophet, or any pictures at all. Perhaps this is something that has been left unclear.
  • If you get the chance to see Richard Thompson on his current acoustic tour, don’t miss it. He was superb in Cambridge on Monday night.
  • In all the rude things people have said about wikipedia recently, no one seems to have checked its entry for Mormonism which seems to have been very comprehensively edited by Mormons. The reader would suppose there was a serious dispute about the existence of the angel Moroni.
  • The very last word on fellatio — actually, quite a lot of words and if you read to the end you may feel there are too many; when I first wrote this entry I had said entirely work-safe if you’re reading in Lambeth Palace but then I scrolled further down and would like to revise this opinion. Language Log is not normally about tongues in such a literal sense..
Posted in Blather | 2 Comments

Last set of shorts

Posted on January 27, 2006 by acb

I’m away for the weekend: there’ll be no posting. In the meantime, more gossip and thought wittering.

  • A story about the Dean of an Oxbridge college, who found his organist was having an affair with his chaplain. This upset him. The Chaplain’s wife was pretty unhappy, too. So he went to the college and said “It’s him or me”. The college thought for a while, and decided that the truly important thing about having a chapel was that the organ playing should be up to scratch. The Dean went.
  • Is there any real difference between the modern Chinese attitude to IP and the Elizabethan English attitude to Spanish treasure? State-sponsored piracy is not a new invention.
  • A coward dies a thousand deaths, they say, but modern science has changed all that. With our increased life expectancies, anyone even slightly prone to panic attacks can expect a head-on collision with approaching death twenty or thirty thousand times before the real thing.
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