Monthly Archive for November, 2007

Three out of five ain’t bad

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on November 27, 2007
in In the news
. 0 Comments

For complex familial reasons, I’m going to be making a fair few flights over the course of the coming holiday season—and am already feeling faint terror at the prospect of a strike which may shut down Britain’s airports between Christmas and the New Year. In America, meanwhile, the post-thanksgiving travel madness has already kicked off, in honour of which the Foreign Policy blog are directing readers towards their highly entertaining list of the world’s worst airports.

To my surprise, my wife and I have managed to account for three out of the five already (in France, India and Senegal): a triumportate representing around 80 hours of our collective lives. My favourite description, however, has to be that of Mineralnye Vody, in Russia—the airport that time forgot:

Mineralnye Vody, in a war-torn region of the Caucasus not far from the Chechen border, remains a stubborn throwback, right down to the large map of the Soviet Union that hangs in the departure hall. The airport seems to have earned a special place in the hearts of Russia’s foreign journalists, including the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg, who wrote in 2005, “Rather worryingly there’s a man selling Caucasian swords and daggers in the departure lounge and opposite him, over on the wall, is a list of local criminals wanted for murder.” Other amenities include snow and ice inside the terminal, feral cats wandering around, and Brezhnev-era copies of the Kama Sutra in the gift shop.

Of course, anyone who has taken an international flight flight recently could be forgiven for thinking that most of the world’s air transport hubs are evolving into a succession of mini-hells: crowded to the gills and manifestly unsustainable. Then again, air travel has the magical property of vanishing into anecdote soon after it’s over, as if all that discomfort took place in a parallel (albeit massively inconveniencing) world. Neither Dakar or New Delhi have put us off flying again, and I imagine they have few others. Which begs the question—as far as flights are concerned, how inconvenient is too inconvenient?

Beevor’s boo-boo

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on November 27, 2007
in Books and Media
. 0 Comments

To the Café Royal in central London last night for the annual Colman Getty PEN quiz—an annual fundraising event for the writers’ charity PEN in the form of a rather grand pub quiz, at which the cream of London’s literati (as well as a crack team of Prospect staffers, alongside the Political Quarterly) are given the opportunity to show off the breadth of their knowledge—or be humiliated by the lack of it—in front of colleagues and rivals. The event was won, for the second time in three years, by the Mail on Sunday, with the Prospect/PQ team languishing in a mid-table 14th position (out of 36 teams).

We were magnaminous in defeat, and the personal grudge I developed against my teammates—for refusing to listen to my suggestion that Larkin, not Auden, was the 20th-century poet who looked at himself in the mirror and comforted himself with the words, “I am Mrs De Winter now”—will surely soon start to fade. Much harder to get over was the fact that the quote “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history,” which we correctly attributed to Hegel, was mistakenly credited by the quizmasters to Bismarck. Worse, the question was apparently set by none other than the mighty Antony Beevor.

Professor Beevor, consider yourself fact-checked.

UPDATE: For those interested in going straight to source, the full text of Hegel’s lectures can be found here, with the relevant passage in section two, “Pragmatical History”:

…what experience and history teach is this, - that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

Hegel delivered his lectures at the University of Berlin in 1822, 1828, and 1830. Bismarck was born in 1815 and, even given his prodigious abilities, it seems unlikely he was providing aphorisms for the venerable professor before his own 16th birthday.

Prospect online this week

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on November 26, 2007
in Inside Prospect
. 0 Comments
  • Gideon Lichfield, the Economist’s man in Jerusalem, previews tomorrow’s middle east summit in Annapolis. The summit will fall far short of the goals envisaged for it back in the summer, but with Israeli PM Ehud Olmert pledging to start peace talks immediately after the summit—and optimistically suggesting that they may be concluded within a year—there may be nonetheless be some signs of progress.
  • The campaigning organisation Liberty made the front page of the Guardian a couple of weeks ago with its claim that the 28-day pre-charge detention period for terrorist suspects in Britain was longer than the equivalent period in 14 other countries. Alex Carlile, a Lib Dem peer and the independent reviewer of terrorist legislation, disagrees, arguing for Prospect that the Liberty report completely failed to identify the appropriate measures in other legal systems to compare against the pre-charge detention period in Britain.
  • Jonathon Porritt, Colin Tudge and others reply to Dick Taverne’s Prospect cover story on GM food.

Race wars

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on November 26, 2007
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

Just when you thought the dust was settling over the Jim Watson race/IQ affair, the row has re-erupted in the blogosphere, with William Saletan, Slate’s national correspondent, writing a series of articles defending the proposition that there are systematic and measurable differences in intelligence between the races, and that there is “strong evidence” that these is a genetic component to these differences. He’s been taken to task at Crooked Timber, among other places—Henry Farrell describes the “’scientists’” (scare quotes in the original) on whom Saletan relies to bolster his argument as “demonstrable charlatans and cranks.” It’s difficult to credit that a journalist as senior as Saletan would be as lazy with his research as some of his critics allege on a topic as flammable as this, but to these untutored eyes at least, he does seem to have rather been skewered.

A rather more minor race war recently erupted on this side of the Atlantic, when New Labour activist and blogger Alex Hilton made the spectacularly bad judgement that it would be a good idea to “out” the 22-year-old daughter of a Tory MP for having quoted, on her Facebook page, a (black) friend of hers using the term “nigga.” After the story reached the Standard, Hilton dug an ever deeper hole for himself with a article for the Guardian’s Comment is Free, which opened:

I’m half Indian; my father was a refugee from Uganda in the 1970s, but I look white to most people. Some people have told me that has given me a specific view of racism - like a black man looking out of a white man’s body.

The subsequent comments demonstrated a unanimity very rarely encountered in the CiF pigpen, and are well worth browsing through if you’re having a slow Monday. Hilton eventually caved in and issued a grudging apology on his blog, Recess Monkey.

Censoring the word

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on November 26, 2007
in Media
. 0 Comments

Fresh from a thanksgiving vacation in the land of the free, I’ve returned to a country boiling—or, at least, tepidly heaving—with the kind of debate conducted on an almost daily basis in the US in the context of the First Amendment: the freedom of expression (see Caroline’s previous post on the Oxford Union/Nick Griffin/David Irving controversy). It’s an area in which we Brits, lacking a written constitution, seem to be at once less strident and more distrustful of general principles than our American cousins.

Equally on my mind, however, is the historical context of censorship, thanks largely to an arresting and timely book that appeared this September as part of Seagull’s series of Manifestos for the Twenty-First Century. Entitled Censoring the Word, it consists of a 107-page essay by Julian Petley interrogating the concept of free expression in the media. His approach is both polemical and historical (with a distinctively Marxist bent), and concisely illustrates the power of the forces ranged against freedom of expression, often in the guise of offering it. This, for instance, is quoted from the eerily prescient Pilkington Report (1960) on broadcasting:

“To give the public what it wants” is a misleading phrase: misleading because as commonly used it has the appearance of an appeal to democratic principle but the appearance is deceptive. It is in fact patronising and arrogant, in that it claims to know what the public is, but defines it as no more than the mass audience; and in that, it claims to know what it wants, but it limits its choice to the average of experience. In this sense, we reject it utterly. If there is a sense in which it should be used, it is this: what the public wants and what it has the right to get is freedom to choose from the widest range of programme matter. Anything less than that is deprivation.

Perhaps most striking of all, however, are Petley’s reminders that—although the precedents and laws that enshrine freedom of expression today have been hard-won—dissenting modes of expression have repeatedly been driven to the margins of the media by the very different kind of freedom enshrined in mass-market economics. Between 1850 and 1920, for example, the “financial hurdle” required to run a viable British newspaper increased by over a hundred times as a result of market forces: rising expenditures and lower cover prices, engendered by technological innovation, massively forced up the circulation newspapers required to become profitable. The abolition of advertisement duty in 1853, similarly, meant papers could halve their cover prices, and then halve them again, in subsequent decades—but also that advertisers gained an effective licensing power over newspaper content, and with this the ability to bar commercially problematic writings from the mass market.

Electronically, of course, we currently enjoy a level of freedom unknown in even the headiest days of radical pamphleteering. But with the costs of exponential internet expansion likely to be inflicted at some point back on consumers, it may be as well to remember that deregulation has historically proved to be the most powerful censorship of all.

Free speech (for some)

Published
by
Caroline
on November 26, 2007
in In the news
. 10 Comments

The furore surrounding the proposed Oxford Union forum has intensified over the weekend. As the shadow defence minister, Julian Lewis, resigned his union membership in disgust over its decision to invite the Holocaust-denier David Irving, and BNP leader Nick Griffin, to speak in tomorrow’s debate, all sides of the liberal gamut have been busy publicly expounding their opinions. While Lewis has decried the arrogance of the Union, claiming that it is “sheer vanity” of the organisation and its members to imagine that any consensus it reaches will succeed in damaging the standing of the largely abhorred party, the Lib Dem MP Evan Harris, one of the speakers billed for the ‘limits of free speech debate,’ argues that it is the “views of these extremists which are a disgrace…not their right to hold their views.”

According to the tenth article of the European Convention on Human Rights, “everyone has the right to freedom of expression,” and that entitlement is a fundamental principle to the preservation of a democratic society. Lewis should be applauded for exercising his right; but it is rather paradoxical that he should do so (seemingly unaware of the irony) in circumstances that would forbid the extension of this right to all members of society - no matter how disgraceful - Irving’s in particular - their views. In light of the recent kerbs of democratic freedoms in Pakistan, the ECHR precept that it is a human right to hold opinions and “impart information and ideas without interference by public authority,” is something that should be safeguarded, rather than censured.

Creative capital

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on November 25, 2007
in Arts and culture, Books and Economics
. 0 Comments

The market now laps onto so many shores that it can be odd to remember the horror provoked by the first wave of Reaganomics. Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, published for the first time in 1983, was one of many efforts of that time that looked for non-market alternatives. The book became a word-of-mouth success, and was finally published in the UK this year in paperback. This made it eligible for the Prospect Reading Group’s November meeting.

Hyde, a professor of creative writing in the US, argues that in western society the balance between the gift and market economies has become too skewed in one direction. He does this by hopping from an anthropological theory of gift-giving to a detailed exegesis of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound as examples of giftedness, with a look at the Protestant reformation along the way.

There is a charm in the eccentric path of the argument, and one understands the book’s appeal as a robust declaration of the right of things to be pursued for their own sake rather than for some ulterior purpose. One of the most depressing elements of modern life is the feeling that there is now no escape from a narrowly managerial view, in which everything is instrumental and nothing counts unless it can be measured.

The book has its disappointments, however. The parts do not work together as a whole, and it becomes obvious that Hyde is not going out of his comfort zone, sticking only to the literary arts and even then, only to examples that match his transcendent ideal. Hyde has a very particular Romantic view of creativity: for him, the artist is an untutored and inarticulate genius, and emotions are separated from critical thought by a very high wall. One can make room for creativity without relying on this old trope.

At least one of his case studies may not have stood the test of time. We’ve learned a lot more since about Walt Whitman who – far from being the unworldly poet – was a busy newspaper editor and entrepreneur who wrote favourable reviews of his own work under a pseudonym.

The most fascinating passages, to me, end up being about usury in the Middle Ages, and an afterword about the impact of the end of the Cold War on government support for the arts. The alternatives that Hyde proposes for support to creative work are original, and should be explored more widely.

Prospect’s new issue—taking sport seriously

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on November 22, 2007
in Inside Prospect and Sport
. 8 Comments

december_2007.gifIf anyone needed reminding that sport matters in Britain, the fact that England’s ejection from the European Championships and Steve McLaren’s subsequent sacking has topped the news today should seal the point. But despite the central role of sport in our culture, its meaning and appeal are still not taken seriously in Britain, argues David Goldblatt in the new issue of Prospect. We tend to deem sport unworthy of proper intellectual or political attention, and our political and cultural elites keep their distance from sport. One consequence of this is that standards of governance within our sporting institutions are laughably low.

It’s time, says Goldblatt, for sport to enjoy the same cultural weight as the performing arts, and to be judged by the normal standards of public life. Why do you think sport fails to be taken seriously in Britain—and what can we do about it? Let us know in the comments box.

Canon anxiety

Published
by
Mary Fitzgerald
on November 22, 2007
in Arts and culture, Books and Inside Prospect
. 9 Comments

According to chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks, our shared cultural inheritance—“predicated on the idea of a canon, a set of texts that everyone knew”—is being destroyed by multiculturalism and tecnology. In his essay this month, Richard Jenkyns questions the need for a strictly defined canon—where “the great books form a clearly determinate class.” Society does need shared references, he argues, but these need not be high cultural: “In their time, Morecambe and Wise did more than Milton and Wordsworth to make us feel one as people.” Disaffected young Asians are hardly going to feel more “British” after being force-fed Hamlet, Middlemarch and the Psalms.

Nevertheless, Jenkyns identifies a growing “canon anxiety” among contemporary intellectuals, and attributes this partly to the fact that our age lacks “cultural heroes”—giving rise to the tendency to venerate our inheritance from the past; indeed, to canonise it.

Yet heroism is itself a problematic and highly subjective term. Much as we might define the canon differently, might we not also find more “heroes” if we broaden the terms of reference? Or are both of these endeavours vain attempts to compensate for what, as Sacks argues, is being lost? Let us know what you think.

The silicon valley of China?

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on November 22, 2007
in China and Inside Prospect
. 7 Comments

Rob Gifford’s piece of reportage from China in the new issue of Prospect opens with the staggering statistic that there are 49 Chinese cities with a population of over 1m. One of these is Hefei (4.7m). Heard of it? Thought not. Almost unknown outside of China, the inland city aspires to be the country’s answer to Silicon Valley by 2020. Gifford paid a visit to Hefei as part of his journey along China’s new Route 312, and found a bustling city whose aspirations are emblematic of the future of China—and whose success raises thorny questions about the relationship between political and economic freedom.