1. Buy new cooker online. Take careful note of the terms and conditions, which state that unless your existing cooker is thoroughly disconnected at time of delivery, the delivery staff will neither take it away nor install the new one for you.
2. Spend an evening with your head in a cupboard disconnecting wires.
3. Await delivery of new cooker.
4. Receive phone call informing you that the delivery staff have accidentally dropped your new cooker, which is now in bits, and that it will take a week to procure a new one from the manufacturers. Explain angrily that there's no way you'll be able to reconnect the old cooker safely, and that this means you'll be spending a week preparing meals for two adults and a one-year-old using a camping stove.
5. Spend a week preparing meals for two adults and a one-year-old using a camping stove.
6. Await delivery of new cooker.
7. Welcome delivery staff. Listen in appalled horror as they inform you that you've been too thorough in disconnecting the old cooker, that they need to reattach some of the screws you took out from the junction box, and that this is utterly, completely infeasible without a magnetic screwdriver, which, oops, they happen not to have with them that day. Watch as delivery staff demonstrate that, look, they're trying their best but, ooh, it's really hard.
8. Watch as wife demands access to junction box and reattaches screws with brisk efficiency. Try very, very hard not to giggle.
9. Watch as delivery staff install new cooker, take away old cooker and leave.
10. Victory dance.
11. [Optional] Agree to throw in new cooker free if potential buyers agree to purchase your house. Repeat from 1.
Showing posts with label ranting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ranting. Show all posts
19 April 2011
11 February 2011
'Road Lines'
What is the secret of the British ‘road lines’?
Across Britain, narrow lines can be observed at the edges of many roads. They occur close against the kerbside and parallel to it, on both major and minor highways. They occur singly or in pairs, appearing to be marked out in something similar to yellow paint. They range from two or three metres to many kilometres in length.
Where do the ‘road lines’ come from? Who makes them? What is their significance? Do they have a meaning -- and if so who, is intended to understand?
Millions of British motorists pass the ‘road lines’ in their cars each day, parking on them to visit the shops or pick their children up from school. None of them has the slightest clue as to the meaning of the mystery beneath their tyres.
Across Britain, narrow lines can be observed at the edges of many roads. They occur close against the kerbside and parallel to it, on both major and minor highways. They occur singly or in pairs, appearing to be marked out in something similar to yellow paint. They range from two or three metres to many kilometres in length.
Where do the ‘road lines’ come from? Who makes them? What is their significance? Do they have a meaning -- and if so who, is intended to understand?
Millions of British motorists pass the ‘road lines’ in their cars each day, parking on them to visit the shops or pick their children up from school. None of them has the slightest clue as to the meaning of the mystery beneath their tyres.
28 March 2010
Some Days It Saves Time Just to Hate Everybody
If I ever discard the mutant remnants of my christian faith, abjure my God and admit to the world "Yes, you were right, I've been following a stupid fairy story and what's more I knew that all along, I'm so sorry I wasted your time with it and incidentally I take full personal responsibility for such atrocities as the Inquisition, the Crusades and Godspell..."
(Deep breath...)
...it won't be because of a realisation that the Bible doesn't describe scientific fact, because that's very, very obvious and I assimilated it into my faith a long, long time ago. It won't be due to the fact that textual transmission simply doesn't allow for the Bible to be the inspired Word of God in any consistent sense, because although I came to this realisation a fair while later, it was still a good decade ago, and my faith appears to have evolved to fit the modified mental niche that it created. It won't be thanks to a fear that by professing a moderate christianity I'm somehow empowering those who profess more dogmatic, fundamentalist and oppressive forms of the faith, because it's obvious to me that pulling out and abandoning Jesus' legacy to such people would empower them far more.
No, if I ever do apostasise myself it'll be because I'm so bloody tired of being stuck in the middle between the aforesaid extremists who make absurd politically motivated claims in my name, and the mostly reasonable atheists and agnostics who think it's fair to look at the behaviour of said extremists and tar the rest of us with a brush of idiocy.
Consider the first letter here, for example. In it, some men who hold unelected seats in the upper chamber of the national legislature by virtue of their position in the hierarchy of the state-established church sponsored by the monarch, complain that society discriminates against them because of their faith. I'm aware that Anglican bishops aren't usually the kind who come to mind when talking of the lunatic fringe, but note that slily casual reference to "Christian beliefs on marriage, conscience and worship" -- they're talking about their "right" to institutionalised homophobia.
You might think christians would be reconciled to powerlessness, given how the faith started, but 2,000 years of history have had their effect. In the minds of some, it seems that any erosion of the traditional power of christian authority to dictate the lives of others counts as persecution, however ludicrous this may look to outsiders. (Jonathan Bartley of Ekklesia has described the historical and political basis of this far better than I can.)
Those outsiders, of course, then think it's reasonable to make comments along the lines of "Not so nice when the bigot-boot's on the other foot, is it, Jesus-boy, eh? Eh? Ah!" and "Goodness me, what a lot of silly people these christians obviously are." Which, for those moderate christians who can entirely see their point but would rather not be poked with it ourselves, is terribly wearying.
(The less moderate atheists and agnostics are less moderate in their responses, of course. This can be hurtful and annoying, but there's still a gap between "hurtful and annoying comments which nobody makes much of a fuss about" and "culturally sanctioned persecution" which many of the christians in the early Roman Empire or the People's Republic of China would be able to help us explore.)
Certain parts of mainstream culture in the UK are all too happy to pounce on any possible instance of anti-christian "discrimination", while studiously ignoring discrimination against other faiths (or worse, portraying other faith groups' calls for inclusion as being themselves a form of anti-christian persecution). It's all too easy to add the words "...in our own country" onto the end of such complains, thus playing directly into the hands of the BNP.
In the end, churches in the UK are rarely the targets of hate crimes, unlike the mosques, synagogues and gurdwaras which the aforementioned BNP target. (When they are it's either due to long-held sectarian divisions within christianity itself, or because some psycho parishioner has a grudge against the vicar.)
Until I see a smoke-damaged church with "XTIANS OUT 666" scrawled on it, I'll feel that these bishops, and other christians giving voice to this kind of politically naive and damaging rhetoric, lack a basic sense of proportion.
(Deep breath...)
...it won't be because of a realisation that the Bible doesn't describe scientific fact, because that's very, very obvious and I assimilated it into my faith a long, long time ago. It won't be due to the fact that textual transmission simply doesn't allow for the Bible to be the inspired Word of God in any consistent sense, because although I came to this realisation a fair while later, it was still a good decade ago, and my faith appears to have evolved to fit the modified mental niche that it created. It won't be thanks to a fear that by professing a moderate christianity I'm somehow empowering those who profess more dogmatic, fundamentalist and oppressive forms of the faith, because it's obvious to me that pulling out and abandoning Jesus' legacy to such people would empower them far more.
No, if I ever do apostasise myself it'll be because I'm so bloody tired of being stuck in the middle between the aforesaid extremists who make absurd politically motivated claims in my name, and the mostly reasonable atheists and agnostics who think it's fair to look at the behaviour of said extremists and tar the rest of us with a brush of idiocy.
Consider the first letter here, for example. In it, some men who hold unelected seats in the upper chamber of the national legislature by virtue of their position in the hierarchy of the state-established church sponsored by the monarch, complain that society discriminates against them because of their faith. I'm aware that Anglican bishops aren't usually the kind who come to mind when talking of the lunatic fringe, but note that slily casual reference to "Christian beliefs on marriage, conscience and worship" -- they're talking about their "right" to institutionalised homophobia.
You might think christians would be reconciled to powerlessness, given how the faith started, but 2,000 years of history have had their effect. In the minds of some, it seems that any erosion of the traditional power of christian authority to dictate the lives of others counts as persecution, however ludicrous this may look to outsiders. (Jonathan Bartley of Ekklesia has described the historical and political basis of this far better than I can.)
Those outsiders, of course, then think it's reasonable to make comments along the lines of "Not so nice when the bigot-boot's on the other foot, is it, Jesus-boy, eh? Eh? Ah!" and "Goodness me, what a lot of silly people these christians obviously are." Which, for those moderate christians who can entirely see their point but would rather not be poked with it ourselves, is terribly wearying.
(The less moderate atheists and agnostics are less moderate in their responses, of course. This can be hurtful and annoying, but there's still a gap between "hurtful and annoying comments which nobody makes much of a fuss about" and "culturally sanctioned persecution" which many of the christians in the early Roman Empire or the People's Republic of China would be able to help us explore.)
Certain parts of mainstream culture in the UK are all too happy to pounce on any possible instance of anti-christian "discrimination", while studiously ignoring discrimination against other faiths (or worse, portraying other faith groups' calls for inclusion as being themselves a form of anti-christian persecution). It's all too easy to add the words "...in our own country" onto the end of such complains, thus playing directly into the hands of the BNP.
In the end, churches in the UK are rarely the targets of hate crimes, unlike the mosques, synagogues and gurdwaras which the aforementioned BNP target. (When they are it's either due to long-held sectarian divisions within christianity itself, or because some psycho parishioner has a grudge against the vicar.)
Until I see a smoke-damaged church with "XTIANS OUT 666" scrawled on it, I'll feel that these bishops, and other christians giving voice to this kind of politically naive and damaging rhetoric, lack a basic sense of proportion.
03 June 2009
I am Jack's Irritating Adolescent Self-Absorption
Up until last Sunday, I'd somehow managed to spend every second of the ten years since its original release not watching Fight Club.
This was, as it turns out, the right decision.
After all the praise I'd heard, I couldn't believe what a pile of faux-radical, pseudo-intellectual drivel it was. To be sure it's well made and well acted and the like -- and I did enjoy the animated Ikea catalogue sequence -- but almost everything about the story itself rubbed me up the wrong way.
[SPOILERS follow, just in case someone's reading who's somehow also managed to preserve their Fight Club virginity yet also cares.]
The intellectual elitism of enlightened Tyler Durden saving the humble working man from his ignorant drudgery was so extreme as to border on the gnostic, while the film's message remained astonishingly dumb. As for the meretriciousness of multi-billionaire Brad Pitt informing us in a film funded by Rupert Murdoch's multinational Fox corporation that -- astonishingly -- people are not defined by their material possessions, while the media control what we see and hear... well, I think you can guess my likely reaction. (Plus did you know soap was made from, like, fat? Eww, gross, dude!)
I also object profoundly to the idea that men have been emasculated by society and can only reclaim their manhood by beating the hell out of one another and blowing stuff up. (Although I admit to having rather less of a problem with the shagging Helena Bonham-Carter part.)
It's true that Tyler Durden is, explicitly, barking mad, so it's possible that the film didn't intend to endorse this worldview of his. (Strictly of his alter ego's, as Tyler himself spends the film, in his intellectually shackled middle-class way, wriggling against it.) It wasn't sufficiently clear about what it did endorse, though, for me to have any confidence that this wasn't what it was doing. Certainly casting the charismatic Pitt in the Keyser Söze / Malcolm Crowe role didn't give me any confidence that his apparent position as a Nietzschean ubermensch was being especially problematised.
Factor in the cheap plays on the audience's disgust (the filthy house, the human-fat soap) and the asinine twist (which is about as difficult to see coming as Godzilla in East Anglia), and you have a film which rises above the handicap of its very decent acting and production values to stand proudly as appalling rubbish.
I'm sorry, I just hated it. It's put me right off the idea of ever reading any Chuck Palahniuk.
This was, as it turns out, the right decision.
After all the praise I'd heard, I couldn't believe what a pile of faux-radical, pseudo-intellectual drivel it was. To be sure it's well made and well acted and the like -- and I did enjoy the animated Ikea catalogue sequence -- but almost everything about the story itself rubbed me up the wrong way.
[SPOILERS follow, just in case someone's reading who's somehow also managed to preserve their Fight Club virginity yet also cares.]
The intellectual elitism of enlightened Tyler Durden saving the humble working man from his ignorant drudgery was so extreme as to border on the gnostic, while the film's message remained astonishingly dumb. As for the meretriciousness of multi-billionaire Brad Pitt informing us in a film funded by Rupert Murdoch's multinational Fox corporation that -- astonishingly -- people are not defined by their material possessions, while the media control what we see and hear... well, I think you can guess my likely reaction. (Plus did you know soap was made from, like, fat? Eww, gross, dude!)
I also object profoundly to the idea that men have been emasculated by society and can only reclaim their manhood by beating the hell out of one another and blowing stuff up. (Although I admit to having rather less of a problem with the shagging Helena Bonham-Carter part.)
It's true that Tyler Durden is, explicitly, barking mad, so it's possible that the film didn't intend to endorse this worldview of his. (Strictly of his alter ego's, as Tyler himself spends the film, in his intellectually shackled middle-class way, wriggling against it.) It wasn't sufficiently clear about what it did endorse, though, for me to have any confidence that this wasn't what it was doing. Certainly casting the charismatic Pitt in the Keyser Söze / Malcolm Crowe role didn't give me any confidence that his apparent position as a Nietzschean ubermensch was being especially problematised.
Factor in the cheap plays on the audience's disgust (the filthy house, the human-fat soap) and the asinine twist (which is about as difficult to see coming as Godzilla in East Anglia), and you have a film which rises above the handicap of its very decent acting and production values to stand proudly as appalling rubbish.
I'm sorry, I just hated it. It's put me right off the idea of ever reading any Chuck Palahniuk.
29 May 2009
1. Rant, 2. Rave.
1. AMERICAN FANTASY AUTHORS AND SCRIPTWRITERS! A "lady" is a female member of the nobility. "Ladyship" is the quality possessed by such a person. A male minion addressing a female member of the nobility will either call her "my lady" (because she is) or "your ladyship" (out of respect for the quality). A minion who speaks of "my ladyship", in any context, is referring erroneously to a non-existent quality of ladyship which he believes himself to possess, and makes the person who wrote his dialogue look like an utter cretin. It's a solecism on a level with referring to your head of state as "Mr Barack President". Stop it now.
2. Private Eye really should publish their regular "From the Message Boards" spoof on their website, to give it a proper online context. It's brilliantly cumulative -- when you first read it it's only mildly amusing, but its gets funnier and funnier as you learn the "regulars"' posting styles and realise who you know from the web whom they precisely resemble. I'm particularly fond of clueless Hayley_321 ("insted of electian may-be let people jus choos the ppl they want in wesmister?"), and serial sloganeer Sword_of_Truth ("Time to end the disastrous democratic experiment").
2. Private Eye really should publish their regular "From the Message Boards" spoof on their website, to give it a proper online context. It's brilliantly cumulative -- when you first read it it's only mildly amusing, but its gets funnier and funnier as you learn the "regulars"' posting styles and realise who you know from the web whom they precisely resemble. I'm particularly fond of clueless Hayley_321 ("insted of electian may-be let people jus choos the ppl they want in wesmister?"), and serial sloganeer Sword_of_Truth ("Time to end the disastrous democratic experiment").
23 January 2009
No Really, Some of My Best Friends Are Human
Clicking idly along a string of links from a friend's LiveJournal brought me to the "Are You a Humanist?" quiz at the British Humanist Association website.
Now, it's possible I'm reading too much into a harmless piece of fun on the internet. But the notes do state that the quiz is "a more or less serious set of questions designed to help you think about whether you are committed to a religious view of the world, and how this affects your moral beliefs," so I feel entitled to be equally "more or less serious" in investigating its assumptions.
Although the quiz is of the "which of these statements do you agree with?" type, the introductory spiel does specify that you're allowed to choose as many answers as apply. That being the case I actually get twenty answers from the ten questions, but never mind. While I get three or four each of the As, Bs and Cs, I end up with nine Ds -- and it would have been a full 10 if question 3 hadn't appended a stunningly mendacious question-begging rider to the end of that option ("How did the Universe begin? D. The scientific explanations are the best ones available -- no gods were involved.").
Since the Ds are clearly the desirable answers, why doesn't this make me a humanist? According to the interpretive notes, "Humanists don't agree about everything, and you may have collected some other answers too, though if they include As and Bs you’re unlikely to be a humanist."
Well, possibly. It's clear that some of the As ("I can tell right from wrong by... A. reading a holy book or listening to a religious leader") are supposed to be expressive of an uncompromisingly fundamentalist position (so much so, in fact, that it's obvious the quiz compiler has never bothered actually listening to any religious people, but instead has been conversing with a tiny straw man they carry round in their pocket for the purpose). Others, however ("Animals should be treated... A. with respect because they are part of God' s creation"), are ones from which even the most liberal of christians could hardly withhold their assent. (Admittedly I also agree with both the C and D options there, albeit I wouldn't claim C as a philosophical position.)
It's clear enough that the quiz is designed to distinguish between humanists and people "committed to a religious view of the world" -- the elephant in the room being the assumption that these two philosophies are incompatible. Said assumption being in turn, and with all due respect to the B.H.A. and the invaluable social service they provide in the form of, for instance, funeral services for families of a non-religious persuasion, a quivering pile of bollocks.
The fundamentals of humanism -- which emerged as an essentially christian movement during the Renaissance -- are the value and dignity of human life, and the centrality of human freedom and aspirations to the decisions we make about the present and future. I mean, surely. Aren't they?
All of which are things I believe absolutely, based on my religious faith. I'm also very happy to get behind the B.H.A.'s "Vision" of "A world without religious privilege or discrimination, where people are free to live good lives on the basis of reason, experience and shared human values." Honestly, how could I not?
You see, that thing about humanity being created in God's image (see question 8, where it seems the strongest argument the B.H.A. can muster in response is the frankly feeble "Other people matter and should be treated with respect because... D. we will all be happier if we treat each other well")... it's not an anomaly, or a concession, or a platitude. It's the absolute bedrock of anything I'd recognise as christianity.
Christian humanism is a vibrant and fertile philosophical tradition in its own right, as even Wikipedia seems to be aware. (Hell, even the B.H.A. website itself acknowledges that such thinking has existed.) So why does the B.H.A. elect to define humanists as "atheists and agnostics who make sense of the world using reason, experience and shared human values"? Why not just people who do that, for God's sake? Or for Allah's sake, or the Buddha's, or for the sake of our common humanity, or for the sake of future generations or of society or...
...well, for pity's sake, basically. If the B.H.A. are honestly committed to "A world without religious privilege or discrimination," why do they actively exclude the large numbers of people whose humanism derives from, or walks hand-in-hand with, a religious faith? Can it really be sheer prejudice?
Or do they really want to be the British Atheist Foundation? Because, honestly, I wouldn't have a problem with that, if they had the nerve. Meanwhile, they're co-opting a word I've used for years to describe myself, and telling me I'm not allowed it any more. And that pisses me off.
Now, it's possible I'm reading too much into a harmless piece of fun on the internet. But the notes do state that the quiz is "a more or less serious set of questions designed to help you think about whether you are committed to a religious view of the world, and how this affects your moral beliefs," so I feel entitled to be equally "more or less serious" in investigating its assumptions.
Although the quiz is of the "which of these statements do you agree with?" type, the introductory spiel does specify that you're allowed to choose as many answers as apply. That being the case I actually get twenty answers from the ten questions, but never mind. While I get three or four each of the As, Bs and Cs, I end up with nine Ds -- and it would have been a full 10 if question 3 hadn't appended a stunningly mendacious question-begging rider to the end of that option ("How did the Universe begin? D. The scientific explanations are the best ones available -- no gods were involved.").
Since the Ds are clearly the desirable answers, why doesn't this make me a humanist? According to the interpretive notes, "Humanists don't agree about everything, and you may have collected some other answers too, though if they include As and Bs you’re unlikely to be a humanist."
Well, possibly. It's clear that some of the As ("I can tell right from wrong by... A. reading a holy book or listening to a religious leader") are supposed to be expressive of an uncompromisingly fundamentalist position (so much so, in fact, that it's obvious the quiz compiler has never bothered actually listening to any religious people, but instead has been conversing with a tiny straw man they carry round in their pocket for the purpose). Others, however ("Animals should be treated... A. with respect because they are part of God' s creation"), are ones from which even the most liberal of christians could hardly withhold their assent. (Admittedly I also agree with both the C and D options there, albeit I wouldn't claim C as a philosophical position.)
It's clear enough that the quiz is designed to distinguish between humanists and people "committed to a religious view of the world" -- the elephant in the room being the assumption that these two philosophies are incompatible. Said assumption being in turn, and with all due respect to the B.H.A. and the invaluable social service they provide in the form of, for instance, funeral services for families of a non-religious persuasion, a quivering pile of bollocks.
The fundamentals of humanism -- which emerged as an essentially christian movement during the Renaissance -- are the value and dignity of human life, and the centrality of human freedom and aspirations to the decisions we make about the present and future. I mean, surely. Aren't they?
All of which are things I believe absolutely, based on my religious faith. I'm also very happy to get behind the B.H.A.'s "Vision" of "A world without religious privilege or discrimination, where people are free to live good lives on the basis of reason, experience and shared human values." Honestly, how could I not?
You see, that thing about humanity being created in God's image (see question 8, where it seems the strongest argument the B.H.A. can muster in response is the frankly feeble "Other people matter and should be treated with respect because... D. we will all be happier if we treat each other well")... it's not an anomaly, or a concession, or a platitude. It's the absolute bedrock of anything I'd recognise as christianity.
Christian humanism is a vibrant and fertile philosophical tradition in its own right, as even Wikipedia seems to be aware. (Hell, even the B.H.A. website itself acknowledges that such thinking has existed.) So why does the B.H.A. elect to define humanists as "atheists and agnostics who make sense of the world using reason, experience and shared human values"? Why not just people who do that, for God's sake? Or for Allah's sake, or the Buddha's, or for the sake of our common humanity, or for the sake of future generations or of society or...
...well, for pity's sake, basically. If the B.H.A. are honestly committed to "A world without religious privilege or discrimination," why do they actively exclude the large numbers of people whose humanism derives from, or walks hand-in-hand with, a religious faith? Can it really be sheer prejudice?
Or do they really want to be the British Atheist Foundation? Because, honestly, I wouldn't have a problem with that, if they had the nerve. Meanwhile, they're co-opting a word I've used for years to describe myself, and telling me I'm not allowed it any more. And that pisses me off.
26 September 2008
Austen and Ostensibility
After the delay to my Surefish column last month, this month's is up with admirable alacrity. My title was the rather more Austenesque "Fandom and Fundamentalism", but Andy's variant works too.
I just ran a brief google for similarly Austenesque puns, and came up with this insanely wrong-headed blog post, by a freelance writer who subsidises his career with the money he won on a gameshow once -- and is, quite clearly, as wrong as a McCain supporter wearing a "We Love Noel Edmonds" T-shirt.
Not merely because Gillian Anderson is obviously an intensely cerebral, as well as a sublime, sexy, spiritual and deeply sensuous woman, who I'm sure would come in time to appreciate my complementary virtues if we ever met, but -- perhaps more importantly -- because Jane Austen's novels are saturated with economic necessity.
Anyone who thinks that Austen had a fluffy, woolly-headed view of matrimony as a romantic idyll separated from the sordid transactions of the real world, really hasn't been reading her novels properly, and has possibly never actually been in the same room as one.
All together now: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife..."
I just ran a brief google for similarly Austenesque puns, and came up with this insanely wrong-headed blog post, by a freelance writer who subsidises his career with the money he won on a gameshow once -- and is, quite clearly, as wrong as a McCain supporter wearing a "We Love Noel Edmonds" T-shirt.
Not merely because Gillian Anderson is obviously an intensely cerebral, as well as a sublime, sexy, spiritual and deeply sensuous woman, who I'm sure would come in time to appreciate my complementary virtues if we ever met, but -- perhaps more importantly -- because Jane Austen's novels are saturated with economic necessity.
Anyone who thinks that Austen had a fluffy, woolly-headed view of matrimony as a romantic idyll separated from the sordid transactions of the real world, really hasn't been reading her novels properly, and has possibly never actually been in the same room as one.
All together now: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife..."
22 July 2008
Nobody Calls Me Mezzo
Apologies to those of you who share a mailing list with me and saw this yesterday. I'm widening out the consultation.
For the past few years, every time I'd started worrying that I was coming to an end of the list of post-1990 TV which I could persuade B. to watch episode-by-episode and which we'd both be interested in, I'd been comforting myself with the fact that neither of us had ever seen an episode of The Sopranos, the groundbreaking series (and studio stablemate of the damn near perfect Six Feet Under) widely acclaimed as the best TV show of the past 10 years.
We've now watched a season and a half of it, and can't honestly see what I'm supposed to like.
For a start, I don't care about any of the characters -- except, rarely, a couple of the women. When watching drama I'm able sympathise with well-characterised villains, and with complex morally ambivalent characters, and with heroes who are forced to do terrible things in the name of a greater good -- but the characters in The Sopranos perform atrocities routinely, banally, as part of their daily grind. That's just... repellent. It's like watching a soap opera about concentration camp guards.
The macho face-saving culture to which the men all subscribe (where it's apparently shameful to admit to -- among other things -- receiving counselling, having a relative with a learning disability, performing cunnilingus, forgiving anyone for anything ever) is one with which I simply can't have the slightest sympathy. If this was a drama set in, say, imperial China then I'd be able to accept it as a given of the characters' subjective world, but this is, for God's sake, about 21st-century Americans. I keep wanting to slap them in the face repeatedly until they grow up.
I honestly can't imagine why I'm meant to care whether a single one of them lives or dies, but the fact that all the non-gangster characters -- and even the news programmes we see -- find these people endlessly fascinating strongly suggests that the writers are assuming the opposite is true.
The psychiatry aspect of the show is occasionally borderline-interesting (and Dr Melfi is one of the few characters for whom I occasionally feel a twinge of sympathy, when she's not too obviously hero-worshipping Tony), but it's so bound up in the aforementioned idiotic social assumptions, plus obscure U.S. pop-culture references, that half the itme I have no idea what it's getting at.
In the last episode I saw, Tony's therapy sessions kept referring to some ancient pop-folk song I'd never heard of, as some kind of keystone against which Tony judged himself and other people. It was never made clear what the significance of this, for him or for anyone else, might be. At the end of the episode something mildly unexpected happened, and the song played portentously over the end credits. It was like trying to decode a transmission from Tau Ceti.
As a piece of anthropological observation, the show may well have something to be said for it, although I wouldn't want to watch two episodes of it, let along 86. As it is, I'm too busy trying to get a handle on the anthropology to penetrate to the actual drama.
My imminent brother-in-law (according to definition 2b in Merriam-Webster, anyway), who works in TV and knows about this kind of thing, tells us that we need to watch the first three seasons before we give up on it. Honestly, though, I'm not sure I can summon up the stamina.
What am I missing? Does it get better, or will I never like it if I haven't yet?
Am I being racist (for U.S. definitions of "race", since as far as I'm concerned Italians are the same ethnicity I am) in assuming that Italian-American men should be capable of the same degree of moral, emotional and intellectual development as everyone else?
Am I broken inside, or is this the most appallingly overrated television series since the invention of the medium?
I'd welcome your thoughts...
For the past few years, every time I'd started worrying that I was coming to an end of the list of post-1990 TV which I could persuade B. to watch episode-by-episode and which we'd both be interested in, I'd been comforting myself with the fact that neither of us had ever seen an episode of The Sopranos, the groundbreaking series (and studio stablemate of the damn near perfect Six Feet Under) widely acclaimed as the best TV show of the past 10 years.
We've now watched a season and a half of it, and can't honestly see what I'm supposed to like.
For a start, I don't care about any of the characters -- except, rarely, a couple of the women. When watching drama I'm able sympathise with well-characterised villains, and with complex morally ambivalent characters, and with heroes who are forced to do terrible things in the name of a greater good -- but the characters in The Sopranos perform atrocities routinely, banally, as part of their daily grind. That's just... repellent. It's like watching a soap opera about concentration camp guards.
The macho face-saving culture to which the men all subscribe (where it's apparently shameful to admit to -- among other things -- receiving counselling, having a relative with a learning disability, performing cunnilingus, forgiving anyone for anything ever) is one with which I simply can't have the slightest sympathy. If this was a drama set in, say, imperial China then I'd be able to accept it as a given of the characters' subjective world, but this is, for God's sake, about 21st-century Americans. I keep wanting to slap them in the face repeatedly until they grow up.
I honestly can't imagine why I'm meant to care whether a single one of them lives or dies, but the fact that all the non-gangster characters -- and even the news programmes we see -- find these people endlessly fascinating strongly suggests that the writers are assuming the opposite is true.
The psychiatry aspect of the show is occasionally borderline-interesting (and Dr Melfi is one of the few characters for whom I occasionally feel a twinge of sympathy, when she's not too obviously hero-worshipping Tony), but it's so bound up in the aforementioned idiotic social assumptions, plus obscure U.S. pop-culture references, that half the itme I have no idea what it's getting at.
In the last episode I saw, Tony's therapy sessions kept referring to some ancient pop-folk song I'd never heard of, as some kind of keystone against which Tony judged himself and other people. It was never made clear what the significance of this, for him or for anyone else, might be. At the end of the episode something mildly unexpected happened, and the song played portentously over the end credits. It was like trying to decode a transmission from Tau Ceti.
As a piece of anthropological observation, the show may well have something to be said for it, although I wouldn't want to watch two episodes of it, let along 86. As it is, I'm too busy trying to get a handle on the anthropology to penetrate to the actual drama.
My imminent brother-in-law (according to definition 2b in Merriam-Webster, anyway), who works in TV and knows about this kind of thing, tells us that we need to watch the first three seasons before we give up on it. Honestly, though, I'm not sure I can summon up the stamina.
What am I missing? Does it get better, or will I never like it if I haven't yet?
Am I being racist (for U.S. definitions of "race", since as far as I'm concerned Italians are the same ethnicity I am) in assuming that Italian-American men should be capable of the same degree of moral, emotional and intellectual development as everyone else?
Am I broken inside, or is this the most appallingly overrated television series since the invention of the medium?
I'd welcome your thoughts...
09 June 2007
Flaming June
I hate hot bloody weather. People moan about the cold, but when it's cold you can just put on a jumper, or the central heating. What can you do when it's too hot and you've already discarded all the clothing decency allows? Lose weight, that's all. Bah.
That aside, it's been a pleasant couple of weeks. B. and I spent last weekend very enjoyably in London and St Albans, celebrating the respective birthdays of two friends, and staying at flat of the little-sister-in-law and her boyfriend.
Friday night in St Albans was a combination celebration for Not Invented Here's birthday and the 30th anniversary of Star Wars -- both of which we commemorated by watching this comedian act out a breakneck précis of the entire original trilogy in the space of fifty minutes.
I was less impressed with it than most of my companions (who were, in fairness, largely wowed). I felt he really needed a) better voice acting, b) more jokes and c) more visual texture, given that the show consisted essentially of a fast-moving man in a black boiler-suit and the occasional mildly clever lighting change. As it was, the experience was midway between being buttonholed in a pub by an entertaining madman whose company begins to pall after barely the first half-hour, and watching a five-year-old on a tartrazine high running around... well, acting out the entire Star Wars trilogy.
Still, it was entertaining enough, and the company (and the split-level meal before and afterwards) were fun.
On Saturday we met up for lunch with my old friend Z. and her husband W., whom we saw married last August, and who seem very happy still. We then had to climb into 1920s costume (which in my case involved shaving off the goatee bit of my beard to give myself a fine set of muttonchop whiskers [1]) and proceeded hither for my godcousin-in-law's 30th birthday bash [2]. There were canapés and beer, and many more old friends, and a lovely view over the Thames, and it was all thoroughly splendid.
Since then I've mostly been working in one manner or another, though with a brief break on Thursday night to visit some of the better class of drinking establishments in the Bristol area. Lunchtime today we spent with some Australian friends who are sadly about to move back to Australia. Tomorrow we're meeting up with my parents somewhere near Romsey, for some reason. It's all a manic social whirl.
Meanwhile, the borderline-insane idea for a Doctor Who reference book which I mentioned way back when has borne slow-growing contractual fruit. I'm not allowed to say very much about it at present, as the publishers don't want to spoil the surprise, but it'll likely take up a substantial chunk of my attention for the next year or so. I've spent most of my writing time in the past fortnight sorting out preliminary research and assembling a team of experts to help out with the fact-checking.
And speaking of Doctor Who -- as I usually don't, or try not to, or at least not very much, or at least not too much, here -- Paul Cornell's Human Nature and The Family of Blood were both stunningly good, to a degree approaching, with disturbing proximity, actual perfection [3].
You may recall that I'm not a big fan of David Tennant's Doctor, and indeed I'm not -- but I do think that Tennant's a fine actor (not as excellent as Christopher Eccleston, but frankly who is?) when he's not playing the Doctor, as he wasn't for most of the two-parter. It's beyond question the best story since Eccleston left, and I'm not sure it wasn't the best thing the new series has done altogether.
And tonight we have another episode from Steven Moffat, the writer of The Empty Child, The Doctor Dances and The Girl in the Fireplace. And supposedly the Doctor barely appears in it. Which, if all goes well, could make Human Nature through to Blink the best three-episode run of Who since Season One's Cornell-Moffat-Moffat hat-trick.
[Edit 8:25pm: ...Yes, wasn't wrong there.]
And now I'm talking about Doctor Who altogether too much, so I'll stop there.
[1] To be precise, according to this handy spotter's guide to facial hairstyles, they were somewhere between "Friendly Mutton Chops" and a "Franz-Josef".
[2] Godcousin-in-law [n.]: Person whose uncle is one's wife's godfather, but whom one's wife (as she then wasn't) got to know well at university without either of them being privy to this information, until it emerged later with consequences altogether too hilarious to recount here.
[3] We long-term fans were expecting this, of course, given that it was an adaptation of Paul's equally exceptional Doctor Who novel from 1996, Human Nature. ( And if for any reason you feel reluctant to take my word for it, you can read it online here...)
That aside, it's been a pleasant couple of weeks. B. and I spent last weekend very enjoyably in London and St Albans, celebrating the respective birthdays of two friends, and staying at flat of the little-sister-in-law and her boyfriend.
Friday night in St Albans was a combination celebration for Not Invented Here's birthday and the 30th anniversary of Star Wars -- both of which we commemorated by watching this comedian act out a breakneck précis of the entire original trilogy in the space of fifty minutes.
I was less impressed with it than most of my companions (who were, in fairness, largely wowed). I felt he really needed a) better voice acting, b) more jokes and c) more visual texture, given that the show consisted essentially of a fast-moving man in a black boiler-suit and the occasional mildly clever lighting change. As it was, the experience was midway between being buttonholed in a pub by an entertaining madman whose company begins to pall after barely the first half-hour, and watching a five-year-old on a tartrazine high running around... well, acting out the entire Star Wars trilogy.
Still, it was entertaining enough, and the company (and the split-level meal before and afterwards) were fun.
On Saturday we met up for lunch with my old friend Z. and her husband W., whom we saw married last August, and who seem very happy still. We then had to climb into 1920s costume (which in my case involved shaving off the goatee bit of my beard to give myself a fine set of muttonchop whiskers [1]) and proceeded hither for my godcousin-in-law's 30th birthday bash [2]. There were canapés and beer, and many more old friends, and a lovely view over the Thames, and it was all thoroughly splendid.
Since then I've mostly been working in one manner or another, though with a brief break on Thursday night to visit some of the better class of drinking establishments in the Bristol area. Lunchtime today we spent with some Australian friends who are sadly about to move back to Australia. Tomorrow we're meeting up with my parents somewhere near Romsey, for some reason. It's all a manic social whirl.
Meanwhile, the borderline-insane idea for a Doctor Who reference book which I mentioned way back when has borne slow-growing contractual fruit. I'm not allowed to say very much about it at present, as the publishers don't want to spoil the surprise, but it'll likely take up a substantial chunk of my attention for the next year or so. I've spent most of my writing time in the past fortnight sorting out preliminary research and assembling a team of experts to help out with the fact-checking.
And speaking of Doctor Who -- as I usually don't, or try not to, or at least not very much, or at least not too much, here -- Paul Cornell's Human Nature and The Family of Blood were both stunningly good, to a degree approaching, with disturbing proximity, actual perfection [3].
You may recall that I'm not a big fan of David Tennant's Doctor, and indeed I'm not -- but I do think that Tennant's a fine actor (not as excellent as Christopher Eccleston, but frankly who is?) when he's not playing the Doctor, as he wasn't for most of the two-parter. It's beyond question the best story since Eccleston left, and I'm not sure it wasn't the best thing the new series has done altogether.
And tonight we have another episode from Steven Moffat, the writer of The Empty Child, The Doctor Dances and The Girl in the Fireplace. And supposedly the Doctor barely appears in it. Which, if all goes well, could make Human Nature through to Blink the best three-episode run of Who since Season One's Cornell-Moffat-Moffat hat-trick.
[Edit 8:25pm: ...Yes, wasn't wrong there.]
And now I'm talking about Doctor Who altogether too much, so I'll stop there.
[1] To be precise, according to this handy spotter's guide to facial hairstyles, they were somewhere between "Friendly Mutton Chops" and a "Franz-Josef".
[2] Godcousin-in-law [n.]: Person whose uncle is one's wife's godfather, but whom one's wife (as she then wasn't) got to know well at university without either of them being privy to this information, until it emerged later with consequences altogether too hilarious to recount here.
[3] We long-term fans were expecting this, of course, given that it was an adaptation of Paul's equally exceptional Doctor Who novel from 1996, Human Nature. ( And if for any reason you feel reluctant to take my word for it, you can read it online here...)
31 May 2007
Public Service Announcement
Christians! Atheists don't disbelieve in God because they're scared to face the truth about their place in the world, or because it makes them feel less guilty about doing wrong things, or because they secretly know God exists but have chosen to reject God. It takes great courage to try to be a good person in the absence of a received morality, and to face the prospect of oblivion after death.
Atheists disbelieve in God simply because they consider that the available evidence suggests that God doesn't exist. You may well feel that this evidence is flawed or incomplete, but for God's sake do them the basic courtesy of treating their beliefs as an intellectual position rather than a spiritual defect.
* * *
Atheists! Christians and other theists don't believe in God because they've mindlessly absorbed what the church has told them, or because they're too stupid too understand reality, or because they're scared of death and need to invent a comforting fantasy. Theology is a complex, intellectually rigorous discipline, and the prospect of divine judgement with eternal consequences is no less intimidating than that of a simple cessation of life.
Christians believe in God because they consider that they have good reason to think that God exists, despite the evidence you see to the contrary. You may well feel that their reasons are mistaken ones, but for Dawkins' sake give them the respect due to people who have actually thought about all this.
* * *
The sooner everyone accepts this, and starts engaging with each other's points of view without feeling the need to insult, dismiss or belittle, the better.
(I trust we all feel suitably chastised now.)
Atheists disbelieve in God simply because they consider that the available evidence suggests that God doesn't exist. You may well feel that this evidence is flawed or incomplete, but for God's sake do them the basic courtesy of treating their beliefs as an intellectual position rather than a spiritual defect.
* * *
Atheists! Christians and other theists don't believe in God because they've mindlessly absorbed what the church has told them, or because they're too stupid too understand reality, or because they're scared of death and need to invent a comforting fantasy. Theology is a complex, intellectually rigorous discipline, and the prospect of divine judgement with eternal consequences is no less intimidating than that of a simple cessation of life.
Christians believe in God because they consider that they have good reason to think that God exists, despite the evidence you see to the contrary. You may well feel that their reasons are mistaken ones, but for Dawkins' sake give them the respect due to people who have actually thought about all this.
* * *
The sooner everyone accepts this, and starts engaging with each other's points of view without feeling the need to insult, dismiss or belittle, the better.
(I trust we all feel suitably chastised now.)
11 March 2007
Arrrrhhh!
Since 2000 or so I've been using Norton for all my antivirus needs. Recently, however I've found it turning into an elderly prima donna: bloated and slow, demanding of attention, insistent on getting its own way and calling everything else to a halt whenever it deigns to perform.
With my yearly subscription about to expire, I decided I really didn't want to pay any more for the privilege of its company, so I've just been installing the splendidly-named Avast!, a freeware anti-virus application recommended me by friends (thanks chaps).
So far Avast! has been a lot more friendly (I'm running a scan while typing this, which would have been quite excruciating with Norton), though the siren noise it makes when it finds something amiss is a little terrifying.
It's also taken me all bloody afternoon to get it working properly, primarily because Norton simply refuses to work with these amateurs, and deliberately hangs around outstaying its welcome, perhaps in the hope of flowers from the audience. Gah. I think I've got rid of it all now, but it's been a grade-A pain.
And I'm particularly glad I've done it, as I now see from that Wikipedia article that Norton 2007 is completely incompatible with ZoneAlarm, which I'm also using. Bastards.
With my yearly subscription about to expire, I decided I really didn't want to pay any more for the privilege of its company, so I've just been installing the splendidly-named Avast!, a freeware anti-virus application recommended me by friends (thanks chaps).
So far Avast! has been a lot more friendly (I'm running a scan while typing this, which would have been quite excruciating with Norton), though the siren noise it makes when it finds something amiss is a little terrifying.
It's also taken me all bloody afternoon to get it working properly, primarily because Norton simply refuses to work with these amateurs, and deliberately hangs around outstaying its welcome, perhaps in the hope of flowers from the audience. Gah. I think I've got rid of it all now, but it's been a grade-A pain.
And I'm particularly glad I've done it, as I now see from that Wikipedia article that Norton 2007 is completely incompatible with ZoneAlarm, which I'm also using. Bastards.
27 January 2007
Flogging Jehovah
Is it wrong to be polite to Jehovah's Witnesses?
I answered the door to two of them -- a mother and son, I think -- in my dressing-gown this morning, in the hope that they might be delivering my Doctor Who: New Beginnings DVD boxed set. (They weren't, but it's a tactic they might want to consider in future.) They were a little nonplussed by my déshabille, but launched gamely into their spiel before I cut them off, politely, and told them, politely, that I wasn't really able to discuss the Lord Jesus with them right now.
The thing is, I'm not a particularly tolerant person, where intrusions into my privacy are concerned. I have no difficulty being rude to cold-callers who phone up trying to sell me double glazing or new kitchens: they took the job, they're being paid for it (badly, but that's a matter between them and their employer), and they knew full well that my being bloody rude to them was a risk they were accepting along with the position. Also, they're bastards.
I can't bring myself to take that attitude with J.W.s. I doubt my beliefs have more in common with theirs than perhaps a third of the Nicene Creed, I think they show some worryingly cultish tendencies and they most certainly get the christian community (of which they're fairly marginal members) a bad name. But still, I can't help looking at it from their point of view.
As far as they're concerned, their calling from door to door is a desperate attempt to save their neighbours from eternal damnation. Out of sheer charitable love for people who they've never met, and are very likely to tell them to fuck off, they brave rejection, insult and physical violence on a regular basis as a working-out of their faith. That faith isn't mine, and I can't see any way it ever could be. But if I was in their position, I very much doubt I'd have that degree of commitment or moral courage.
Oddly, this isn't a respect I extend to evangelical "missions", Alpha Course organisers, or people who stand in the street shouting through megaphones that I'm going to Hell. They can fuck off, with their bullying rhetoric, their unchallengeable certainties and their smug middle-class haircuts.
The J.W.s, though, I can't help respecting even while I think they're deluded fools.
So... should I continue to be polite to them, and to tell them (as I did today) that although I don't want to talk to them I do appreciate their kindness? Or should I tell them to fuck off, on the grounds that this will discourage them from intruding into people's lives, risking their own safety and bringing religious people (slightly further) into disrepute?
...Actually, I think I know the answer to that. In most cases it wouldn't discourage them at all -- it would just confirm them in their belief that the world is fundamentally corrupt and deaf to their preaching of the truth.
It's difficult to know how you can affect a mindset like that, short of engaging them in actual argument. And sadly that's something I haven't the time or energy -- or commitment, or moral courage -- to do.
I answered the door to two of them -- a mother and son, I think -- in my dressing-gown this morning, in the hope that they might be delivering my Doctor Who: New Beginnings DVD boxed set. (They weren't, but it's a tactic they might want to consider in future.) They were a little nonplussed by my déshabille, but launched gamely into their spiel before I cut them off, politely, and told them, politely, that I wasn't really able to discuss the Lord Jesus with them right now.
The thing is, I'm not a particularly tolerant person, where intrusions into my privacy are concerned. I have no difficulty being rude to cold-callers who phone up trying to sell me double glazing or new kitchens: they took the job, they're being paid for it (badly, but that's a matter between them and their employer), and they knew full well that my being bloody rude to them was a risk they were accepting along with the position. Also, they're bastards.
I can't bring myself to take that attitude with J.W.s. I doubt my beliefs have more in common with theirs than perhaps a third of the Nicene Creed, I think they show some worryingly cultish tendencies and they most certainly get the christian community (of which they're fairly marginal members) a bad name. But still, I can't help looking at it from their point of view.
As far as they're concerned, their calling from door to door is a desperate attempt to save their neighbours from eternal damnation. Out of sheer charitable love for people who they've never met, and are very likely to tell them to fuck off, they brave rejection, insult and physical violence on a regular basis as a working-out of their faith. That faith isn't mine, and I can't see any way it ever could be. But if I was in their position, I very much doubt I'd have that degree of commitment or moral courage.
Oddly, this isn't a respect I extend to evangelical "missions", Alpha Course organisers, or people who stand in the street shouting through megaphones that I'm going to Hell. They can fuck off, with their bullying rhetoric, their unchallengeable certainties and their smug middle-class haircuts.
The J.W.s, though, I can't help respecting even while I think they're deluded fools.
So... should I continue to be polite to them, and to tell them (as I did today) that although I don't want to talk to them I do appreciate their kindness? Or should I tell them to fuck off, on the grounds that this will discourage them from intruding into people's lives, risking their own safety and bringing religious people (slightly further) into disrepute?
...Actually, I think I know the answer to that. In most cases it wouldn't discourage them at all -- it would just confirm them in their belief that the world is fundamentally corrupt and deaf to their preaching of the truth.
It's difficult to know how you can affect a mindset like that, short of engaging them in actual argument. And sadly that's something I haven't the time or energy -- or commitment, or moral courage -- to do.
24 January 2007
Not Chuffed
I can't say I approve of the recent protest by my fellow commuters in Bristol and Bath against First Great Western. Apart from anything else, making sure that your consumer action group gets as much publicity as possible on the very day it's breaking the law by using a publicly-funded service without paying for it, isn't a terribly impressive way of claiming the moral high ground.
Nonetheless, I am most displeased with F.G.W. For weeks now they've been saving money (and raising those all-important shareholder dividends) by running underequipped and overcrowded train services, charging commuters extortionate prices for the privilege of being crammed into carriages like cattle. (Albeit cattle in suits and ties, who instead of being taken to abbatoirs to be electrically stunned and slaughtered will be spending a day behind a desk in an office, staring at computer screens, mooing and chewing the cud in a perplexed kind of way.)
Yesterday my train to work was so crowded it couldn't physically fit me on board. People were standing all the way up the corridors of both carriages, crammed in around the doors and apparently in the toilet as well. (I didn't even know that the service in question had a toilet, but evidently no expense had been spared. Oh, wait.) Of the half-dozen people waiting at our little branch-line station, four managed to squeeze on board after some shoehorning by the guard, while I and one other were turned away. I had to take the bus to Bristol Temple Meads to get a later train, arrive at work an hour late and forego my lunch hour in order to catch up. Grr.
Petty law-breaking and catchily-named pressure groups aren't the way to go, however. Instead, I urge everbody in the South-West to participate fully in the spirit of the free-market philosophy espoused so fervently by this government and their marginally less liberal predecessors, by refusing to give another penny of your money to F.G.W., and instead granting your custom to one of the many comptetitors of theirs who run trains along the same routes.
...Oh, that's right. You can't, in fact, do either of those. Because while the Government passes out marketarian propaganda with one invisible hand, it's using the other to hand over functional monopolies to companies along with millions of pounds of public money, thus effortlessly combining the worst aspects of a state-run monopoly and a profit-driven private company.
That it then makes pathetic excuses for them, instead of enforcing basic standards of customer care, helps to ensure we don't for a moment mistake its sheer corrupt contempt for the public interest for anything so naïve and charming as incompetence.
[Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are not endorsed by anyone other than me. Even the cats are looking dubious, actually. But honestly. T'ch.]
Nonetheless, I am most displeased with F.G.W. For weeks now they've been saving money (and raising those all-important shareholder dividends) by running underequipped and overcrowded train services, charging commuters extortionate prices for the privilege of being crammed into carriages like cattle. (Albeit cattle in suits and ties, who instead of being taken to abbatoirs to be electrically stunned and slaughtered will be spending a day behind a desk in an office, staring at computer screens, mooing and chewing the cud in a perplexed kind of way.)
Yesterday my train to work was so crowded it couldn't physically fit me on board. People were standing all the way up the corridors of both carriages, crammed in around the doors and apparently in the toilet as well. (I didn't even know that the service in question had a toilet, but evidently no expense had been spared. Oh, wait.) Of the half-dozen people waiting at our little branch-line station, four managed to squeeze on board after some shoehorning by the guard, while I and one other were turned away. I had to take the bus to Bristol Temple Meads to get a later train, arrive at work an hour late and forego my lunch hour in order to catch up. Grr.
Petty law-breaking and catchily-named pressure groups aren't the way to go, however. Instead, I urge everbody in the South-West to participate fully in the spirit of the free-market philosophy espoused so fervently by this government and their marginally less liberal predecessors, by refusing to give another penny of your money to F.G.W., and instead granting your custom to one of the many comptetitors of theirs who run trains along the same routes.
...Oh, that's right. You can't, in fact, do either of those. Because while the Government passes out marketarian propaganda with one invisible hand, it's using the other to hand over functional monopolies to companies along with millions of pounds of public money, thus effortlessly combining the worst aspects of a state-run monopoly and a profit-driven private company.
That it then makes pathetic excuses for them, instead of enforcing basic standards of customer care, helps to ensure we don't for a moment mistake its sheer corrupt contempt for the public interest for anything so naïve and charming as incompetence.
[Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are not endorsed by anyone other than me. Even the cats are looking dubious, actually. But honestly. T'ch.]
20 October 2006
Blooming Cheek
I was interested to find, when I followed a link from a recent blog item by Kate Orman, an online listing of the works of literature which the eminent critic Harold Bloom believes comprise the Western Canon.
Originally for this post, I intended to do as Kate had and simply list the books from the list I'd read or seen performed.
However, the traditional Oxbridge Englit B.A. and Masters made this rather a lengthy task. As my selection from Bloom's listing became longer and longer, and more and more dull, I began to feeel depressed at how many of the books in question I'd read purely from a sense of duty, gaining very little actual enjoyment (I mean honestly, have you tried reading The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia?), and how very small a proportion of Bloom's corpus of essential texts, even the English-language ones, I'd covered despite this.
So, instead of boasting about my erudition and exposing my ignorance in the same breath, I'm going to pick holes in Bloom's selection process. That'll teach him to be so bloody self-important.
Honestly, though -- I approve of including Beowulf, naturally, but it was hardly the only interesting thing to be written in English before Chaucer. Where's The Dream of the Rood, or any of the poems from the Exeter Book? Dickens' later novels are some of the best in the English language, but what possible justification could there be for including such early throwaway nonsense as Nicholas Nickleby among of the seminal works of Western literature? You might as well include the funny newspaper columns Dickens collected as The Pickwick bloody Papers. Which, of course, Bloom also does.
All of Shakespeare, Harold? What, even The Comedy of Errors? Even The Two Noble Kinsmen? Are you sure? What on earth did the Earl of Rochester do to deserve being on the list, apart from use the word "fuck" repeatedly in his poetry?
And honestly -- Gilbert and Sullivan?
I note that Vladimir Nabokov -- a Russian who was resident in the U.S. from the age of 41, became a citizen of the U.S. and did his best work there before retiring to Switzerland 20 years later -- is listed by you, Harold, under "The United States". That's probably fair enough -- but what, then, of T.S. Eliot, who lived in England from the age of 26, did all his best work here and died in London as a British citizen, whom you also list under "The United States"? Can we be quite certain that there's no cultural bias at work here, Harold?
And then there's the S.F.
Large amounts of respect are due, admittedly, for including any at all. There are a good many academics who'd consider even Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World to have been fatally contaminated by their association with such a populist genre. You, Harold, on the other hand, include Cat's Cradle, Riddley Walker and The Left Hand of Darkness, along with Wells's S.F. and something by Disch I've never got round to reading. Kudos for that.
But but but -- A Voyage to Arcturus? That was the best work of post-Wells British S.F. you could come up with? I mean, I know it's a philosophical allegory which uses the planetary-exploration genre to dramatise its a/theological dialectic, finally espousing an uncompromisingly Gnostic cosmogony which affirms the divine origins of life whilst at the same time febrilely rejecting the material world and its creator. It says so in my thesis.
But for God's sake, it's excruciatingly-written rubbish! Even C.S. Lewis thought so, and he was pretty much responsible for the fact that anyone outside the S.F. critical community's even heard of it. For this you pass over everything, S.F. or otherwise, written by Olaf Stapledon, Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss (who also thinks it's rubbish, by the way), Christopher Priest or indeed Lewis himself? And that's listing only the British contenders, and thus failing altogether to address the scandalous omission of, to name only the most deserving of the many absent U.S. S.F. authors, Philip K Dick.
Academics, eh. Always obsessing about their own field while entirely ignoring the wider picture. T'sk.
Originally for this post, I intended to do as Kate had and simply list the books from the list I'd read or seen performed.
However, the traditional Oxbridge Englit B.A. and Masters made this rather a lengthy task. As my selection from Bloom's listing became longer and longer, and more and more dull, I began to feeel depressed at how many of the books in question I'd read purely from a sense of duty, gaining very little actual enjoyment (I mean honestly, have you tried reading The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia?), and how very small a proportion of Bloom's corpus of essential texts, even the English-language ones, I'd covered despite this.
So, instead of boasting about my erudition and exposing my ignorance in the same breath, I'm going to pick holes in Bloom's selection process. That'll teach him to be so bloody self-important.
Honestly, though -- I approve of including Beowulf, naturally, but it was hardly the only interesting thing to be written in English before Chaucer. Where's The Dream of the Rood, or any of the poems from the Exeter Book? Dickens' later novels are some of the best in the English language, but what possible justification could there be for including such early throwaway nonsense as Nicholas Nickleby among of the seminal works of Western literature? You might as well include the funny newspaper columns Dickens collected as The Pickwick bloody Papers. Which, of course, Bloom also does.
All of Shakespeare, Harold? What, even The Comedy of Errors? Even The Two Noble Kinsmen? Are you sure? What on earth did the Earl of Rochester do to deserve being on the list, apart from use the word "fuck" repeatedly in his poetry?
And honestly -- Gilbert and Sullivan?
I note that Vladimir Nabokov -- a Russian who was resident in the U.S. from the age of 41, became a citizen of the U.S. and did his best work there before retiring to Switzerland 20 years later -- is listed by you, Harold, under "The United States". That's probably fair enough -- but what, then, of T.S. Eliot, who lived in England from the age of 26, did all his best work here and died in London as a British citizen, whom you also list under "The United States"? Can we be quite certain that there's no cultural bias at work here, Harold?
And then there's the S.F.
Large amounts of respect are due, admittedly, for including any at all. There are a good many academics who'd consider even Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World to have been fatally contaminated by their association with such a populist genre. You, Harold, on the other hand, include Cat's Cradle, Riddley Walker and The Left Hand of Darkness, along with Wells's S.F. and something by Disch I've never got round to reading. Kudos for that.
But but but -- A Voyage to Arcturus? That was the best work of post-Wells British S.F. you could come up with? I mean, I know it's a philosophical allegory which uses the planetary-exploration genre to dramatise its a/theological dialectic, finally espousing an uncompromisingly Gnostic cosmogony which affirms the divine origins of life whilst at the same time febrilely rejecting the material world and its creator. It says so in my thesis.
But for God's sake, it's excruciatingly-written rubbish! Even C.S. Lewis thought so, and he was pretty much responsible for the fact that anyone outside the S.F. critical community's even heard of it. For this you pass over everything, S.F. or otherwise, written by Olaf Stapledon, Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss (who also thinks it's rubbish, by the way), Christopher Priest or indeed Lewis himself? And that's listing only the British contenders, and thus failing altogether to address the scandalous omission of, to name only the most deserving of the many absent U.S. S.F. authors, Philip K Dick.
Academics, eh. Always obsessing about their own field while entirely ignoring the wider picture. T'sk.
29 September 2006
The Marcion Invasion
(What follows is a little bit of a rant, and a little bit of a sermon, and a quite a lot of a party political broadcast for the For Christ's Sake Get Some Perspective party. It starts off fulminating topically about events of the first few centuries A.D., but does become rather more relevant thereafter.
I'm sorry about that. A lot of this has been fermenting in my brain for quite some time now.)
Over the last few Wednesdays, B. and I have been attending our vicar and another vicar's course entitled A Bluffer's Guide to Heresy. So far we've covered Gnosticism, Marcionism and Pelagianism, and are due to be finishing off next week with the Donatists.
It's all good fun -- pop-theology done in an engaging, entertaining way without being in any sense dumbed down. Gnosticism is a subject I know something about, having written in my thesis about science fiction as a modern expression of Gnostic thought, and I enjoyed Simon and Paul's presentation on the subject.
I have some sympathy, to varying degrees, with all of these "heretical" positions. I suspect that Pelagius, in particular, is only considered a heretic because his opponent, Augustine, managed to convince the church he wasn't one. Of their two positions, Pelagius' idea that human beings are created capable of moral perfection seems merely over-optimistic, while Augustine's Manichean-influenced ideas of a fallen world and original sin -- and in particular his negativity towards sex and women -- have caused great harm to the later development of the church. It seems to me that the only reason Pelagius was a heretic and Augustine a saint is the familiar one of history being written by the victors.
Gnosticism I can see good arguments for in that the material world is clearly very imperfect, but have to reject insofar as my own religious experiences have been necessarily mediated through that same created world. Marcionism has a point in that some aspects of the Old Testament are, to say the least, questionable, but makes the mistake (an all too familiar one in a modern context, but rare at the time) of assuming that such scriptures are to be read as historical fact rather than as pointers towards spiritual truth.
Even as pointers towards spiritual truth, some aspects of the Old Testament are, in fact, questionable, which is why I believe that the Bible consists of a progressive series of variously imperfect revelations of God, rather than anything you could sensibly call "fact".
And yet...
Today I read this piece by Stephen Unwin in The Guardian. I haven't read Unwin's book, and I haven't read Richard Dawkins' book to which he's responding (although given that this seems to be the one where the good Professor finally comes out and says that I and all people of faith are delusional and dangerous, I should probably get round to it sooner or later).
This whole area is -- thanks to the indefatigable efforts of fundamentalists of all stripes in the politics of the the U.S., the Middle East, and increasingly here in the U.K. -- a blood-soaked, bomb-strewn minefield.
For the record, I see any kind of theocratic government by scriptural fiat as dangerous, deeply immoral and -- I'm a liberal christian, so I get to swear -- quite astoundingly fuckwitted.
What's more I fully agree with Dawkins, as quoted by Joan Bakewell, that the Bible is "a chaotically cobbled together anthology of disjointed documents", that "sucking up to God" is a poor rationale for moral behaviour and that Unwin's supposed proof of God's probable existence is "quite agreeably funny".
What dismays me is the polarisation expressed in the debate, visible not only in Dawkins' frequent fulminations but in the comments appended to that piece of Unwin's. Despite the visible and vocal presence -- in the U.K., the U.S. and indeed the Middle East -- of christians, jews, muslims and other people of faith who do not reject the truths of science, do not wish to see their particular interpretation of divine ethics enshrined in law, and in particular do not believe that the killing of innocents is an act which any sane form of faith can justify... despite the continual protests of these people against the sickening excesses of their co-religionists, Dawkins and his sympathisers persist in speaking and acting as if all religion, all faith is the enemy of humanity, rather than merely the religion and faith of unbearable mindless fuckwits.
I find this, to be frank, incredibly painful.
I also, needless to say, find painful the fact that apparently American christian fundamentalists are now training their children to believe themselves participants in a global religious war in which they may be called upon to give their lives for Jesus.
Great move, guys. Because what the world really needs just at this precise moment are more fanatical religious zealots prepared to die for their beliefs.
The problem -- or at least, a large part of that aspect of "the problem" which gives rise to this zero-tolerance attitude on all sides -- is precisely the inability to separate the realms of spiritual and factual truth which so beset poor Marcion (and to some extent Augustine, although I think his overly literal reading of Genesis arose more from his psychological hangups than vice versa).
Truths about "God" (and even the word is problematic) are allusive, symbolic and obscure, not because God is vague or shifting but because our only tools for discussing or conceptualising the divine have been evolved for talking and thinking about the experiential world which God exists beyond and outside. (Also "throughout", of course, but not in any way which can be physically quantified or even detected.)
All statements made about God, whether by believers or unbelievers, are therefore suspect. "There is no God but God" and "There is no God" both tell us important and valid things about the divine -- but to take either of them as fact is a grievous category error.
The ways in which this expresses itself in the politics of the U.S., Israel and Islamdom are perfectly clear, and reliably appalling. Unfortunately, Dawkins and his supporters, while not yet at the stage of blowing people up who disagree with them, are equally misled.
Dawkins can protest all he likes that (in Bakewell's words) "given proof he was wrong he would at once change his opinions". His difficulty with faith arises precisely from the fact that God does not exist as part of that realm about which science is better qualified than any to speak. As Dawkins' book presumably attempts to demonstrate, no proof of God's existence (or indeed probability) has yet been produced which was not intellectually flawed, nor can there ever be such a proof. "Proof", as Dawkins and indeed Anselm understand it, is simply not a concept which can apply.
When the divine demonstrates its own existence (which, as I've indicated, I faithfully believe it does), it isn't in a way which can be duplicated or falsified through scientific experiment. If Dawkins underwent a genuine spiritual experience of the kind which has been sufficient to commit so many believers in the history of the world to such diverse faiths, his worldview would force him to dismiss it as a random aberration of his brain chemistry -- ignoring that very qualitative, unquantifiable gap in the rational through which God manifests God's self.
(I sometimes suspect that Dawkins is a very spiritual man. I sometimes think that he longs desperately for God to intervene with a material proof of babelfishesque undeniability, to demonstrate beyond all possible doubt on Richard Dawkins' part that God is real. His berating of God, I sometimes feel, is the lament of a spiritual yearning which can never be satisfied within the material cage which his mind has constructed for itself.
I can't prove this either, of course.)
You may feel that, in arguing against the one group of zealots who aren't currently in control of vast arsenals of tanks, bombs and helicopters, or at least of specially-tailored clothing containing shrapnel and moderate quantities of triacetone triperoxide, I'm going -- like so many of the zealots who are in control of these things -- for the soft target. You would, of course, be quite correct.
Dawkins' confusion is forgivable in a world where the aforementioned unbearable mindless fuckwits persistently declare that God's existence can be proved with science and logic, that Genesis has anything whatsoever to tell us about the biological origin of species, that God regularly intervenes in history, politics and economics to ensure that good people prosper and wicked people founder -- that, not to put too fine a point on it, propositions which are quite evidently false in the real world are or should be part of the belief-systems of those who accept God.
Making God's existence incompatible with the world as our reason and our perception understand it: that, ladies and gentlemen, is one type of doctrine which I'd be very willing to dismiss as heresy.
I'm sorry about that. A lot of this has been fermenting in my brain for quite some time now.)
Over the last few Wednesdays, B. and I have been attending our vicar and another vicar's course entitled A Bluffer's Guide to Heresy. So far we've covered Gnosticism, Marcionism and Pelagianism, and are due to be finishing off next week with the Donatists.
It's all good fun -- pop-theology done in an engaging, entertaining way without being in any sense dumbed down. Gnosticism is a subject I know something about, having written in my thesis about science fiction as a modern expression of Gnostic thought, and I enjoyed Simon and Paul's presentation on the subject.
I have some sympathy, to varying degrees, with all of these "heretical" positions. I suspect that Pelagius, in particular, is only considered a heretic because his opponent, Augustine, managed to convince the church he wasn't one. Of their two positions, Pelagius' idea that human beings are created capable of moral perfection seems merely over-optimistic, while Augustine's Manichean-influenced ideas of a fallen world and original sin -- and in particular his negativity towards sex and women -- have caused great harm to the later development of the church. It seems to me that the only reason Pelagius was a heretic and Augustine a saint is the familiar one of history being written by the victors.
Gnosticism I can see good arguments for in that the material world is clearly very imperfect, but have to reject insofar as my own religious experiences have been necessarily mediated through that same created world. Marcionism has a point in that some aspects of the Old Testament are, to say the least, questionable, but makes the mistake (an all too familiar one in a modern context, but rare at the time) of assuming that such scriptures are to be read as historical fact rather than as pointers towards spiritual truth.
Even as pointers towards spiritual truth, some aspects of the Old Testament are, in fact, questionable, which is why I believe that the Bible consists of a progressive series of variously imperfect revelations of God, rather than anything you could sensibly call "fact".
And yet...
Today I read this piece by Stephen Unwin in The Guardian. I haven't read Unwin's book, and I haven't read Richard Dawkins' book to which he's responding (although given that this seems to be the one where the good Professor finally comes out and says that I and all people of faith are delusional and dangerous, I should probably get round to it sooner or later).
This whole area is -- thanks to the indefatigable efforts of fundamentalists of all stripes in the politics of the the U.S., the Middle East, and increasingly here in the U.K. -- a blood-soaked, bomb-strewn minefield.
For the record, I see any kind of theocratic government by scriptural fiat as dangerous, deeply immoral and -- I'm a liberal christian, so I get to swear -- quite astoundingly fuckwitted.
What's more I fully agree with Dawkins, as quoted by Joan Bakewell, that the Bible is "a chaotically cobbled together anthology of disjointed documents", that "sucking up to God" is a poor rationale for moral behaviour and that Unwin's supposed proof of God's probable existence is "quite agreeably funny".
What dismays me is the polarisation expressed in the debate, visible not only in Dawkins' frequent fulminations but in the comments appended to that piece of Unwin's. Despite the visible and vocal presence -- in the U.K., the U.S. and indeed the Middle East -- of christians, jews, muslims and other people of faith who do not reject the truths of science, do not wish to see their particular interpretation of divine ethics enshrined in law, and in particular do not believe that the killing of innocents is an act which any sane form of faith can justify... despite the continual protests of these people against the sickening excesses of their co-religionists, Dawkins and his sympathisers persist in speaking and acting as if all religion, all faith is the enemy of humanity, rather than merely the religion and faith of unbearable mindless fuckwits.
I find this, to be frank, incredibly painful.
I also, needless to say, find painful the fact that apparently American christian fundamentalists are now training their children to believe themselves participants in a global religious war in which they may be called upon to give their lives for Jesus.
Great move, guys. Because what the world really needs just at this precise moment are more fanatical religious zealots prepared to die for their beliefs.
The problem -- or at least, a large part of that aspect of "the problem" which gives rise to this zero-tolerance attitude on all sides -- is precisely the inability to separate the realms of spiritual and factual truth which so beset poor Marcion (and to some extent Augustine, although I think his overly literal reading of Genesis arose more from his psychological hangups than vice versa).
Truths about "God" (and even the word is problematic) are allusive, symbolic and obscure, not because God is vague or shifting but because our only tools for discussing or conceptualising the divine have been evolved for talking and thinking about the experiential world which God exists beyond and outside. (Also "throughout", of course, but not in any way which can be physically quantified or even detected.)
All statements made about God, whether by believers or unbelievers, are therefore suspect. "There is no God but God" and "There is no God" both tell us important and valid things about the divine -- but to take either of them as fact is a grievous category error.
The ways in which this expresses itself in the politics of the U.S., Israel and Islamdom are perfectly clear, and reliably appalling. Unfortunately, Dawkins and his supporters, while not yet at the stage of blowing people up who disagree with them, are equally misled.
Dawkins can protest all he likes that (in Bakewell's words) "given proof he was wrong he would at once change his opinions". His difficulty with faith arises precisely from the fact that God does not exist as part of that realm about which science is better qualified than any to speak. As Dawkins' book presumably attempts to demonstrate, no proof of God's existence (or indeed probability) has yet been produced which was not intellectually flawed, nor can there ever be such a proof. "Proof", as Dawkins and indeed Anselm understand it, is simply not a concept which can apply.
When the divine demonstrates its own existence (which, as I've indicated, I faithfully believe it does), it isn't in a way which can be duplicated or falsified through scientific experiment. If Dawkins underwent a genuine spiritual experience of the kind which has been sufficient to commit so many believers in the history of the world to such diverse faiths, his worldview would force him to dismiss it as a random aberration of his brain chemistry -- ignoring that very qualitative, unquantifiable gap in the rational through which God manifests God's self.
(I sometimes suspect that Dawkins is a very spiritual man. I sometimes think that he longs desperately for God to intervene with a material proof of babelfishesque undeniability, to demonstrate beyond all possible doubt on Richard Dawkins' part that God is real. His berating of God, I sometimes feel, is the lament of a spiritual yearning which can never be satisfied within the material cage which his mind has constructed for itself.
I can't prove this either, of course.)
You may feel that, in arguing against the one group of zealots who aren't currently in control of vast arsenals of tanks, bombs and helicopters, or at least of specially-tailored clothing containing shrapnel and moderate quantities of triacetone triperoxide, I'm going -- like so many of the zealots who are in control of these things -- for the soft target. You would, of course, be quite correct.
Dawkins' confusion is forgivable in a world where the aforementioned unbearable mindless fuckwits persistently declare that God's existence can be proved with science and logic, that Genesis has anything whatsoever to tell us about the biological origin of species, that God regularly intervenes in history, politics and economics to ensure that good people prosper and wicked people founder -- that, not to put too fine a point on it, propositions which are quite evidently false in the real world are or should be part of the belief-systems of those who accept God.
Making God's existence incompatible with the world as our reason and our perception understand it: that, ladies and gentlemen, is one type of doctrine which I'd be very willing to dismiss as heresy.
26 June 2006
Search Me, Mate
The Amazon.com pages for Of the City of the Saved... now contain, it seems, the entire contents of the novel, from copyright notice to back blurb. (WARNING: not every page of same is necessarily work-safe or child-friendly. Nor was it ever meant to be, frankly.)
The same is true of The Book of the War and the other Faction Paradox novels.
"Surprise Me!", it says. Well, yes, now you come to mention it.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. From a legal point of view it's unassailable, since it's evidently been done with the permission of Mad Norwegian Press, who in accordance with normal U.S. practice for shared-universe novels hold the copyright in the text. On the other hand, I have grave reservations about any online content provider archiving entire scanned texts of in-copyright works (I'm equally dubious about Google Book Search), and I can't help feeling even more so when the text in question is one I spent a year writing.
I can't currently see that there'd be any impediment in place to a sufficiently dedicated reader doing repeated searches until they'd managed to access, and thus read, every page in the book without paying for it. It would be a lot of hassle, but it would be free -- and while my browser at least refuses to cache or print the pages in question, I know too much about computer geekdom to suppose that workarounds for these restrictions don't exist.
And, while free access to information may well be very admirable and demotic in an anarchist sort of way, somebody doing such a thing would be depriving Mad Norwegian of revenue, and thus slightly reducing the likelihood of the Faction Paradox line of novels continuing -- as well as my (admittedly remote) chances of ever seeing any royalties from the book.
Still, the facility's there if you want it. Use it wisely.
[Edit to add: The initial link is to an excerpt only. However, if you search on a character name (like "Urbanus") or a reasonably common word (like, say, "city"), you'll find it links you to occurrences throughout the book.]
The same is true of The Book of the War and the other Faction Paradox novels.
"Surprise Me!", it says. Well, yes, now you come to mention it.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. From a legal point of view it's unassailable, since it's evidently been done with the permission of Mad Norwegian Press, who in accordance with normal U.S. practice for shared-universe novels hold the copyright in the text. On the other hand, I have grave reservations about any online content provider archiving entire scanned texts of in-copyright works (I'm equally dubious about Google Book Search), and I can't help feeling even more so when the text in question is one I spent a year writing.
I can't currently see that there'd be any impediment in place to a sufficiently dedicated reader doing repeated searches until they'd managed to access, and thus read, every page in the book without paying for it. It would be a lot of hassle, but it would be free -- and while my browser at least refuses to cache or print the pages in question, I know too much about computer geekdom to suppose that workarounds for these restrictions don't exist.
And, while free access to information may well be very admirable and demotic in an anarchist sort of way, somebody doing such a thing would be depriving Mad Norwegian of revenue, and thus slightly reducing the likelihood of the Faction Paradox line of novels continuing -- as well as my (admittedly remote) chances of ever seeing any royalties from the book.
Still, the facility's there if you want it. Use it wisely.
[Edit to add: The initial link is to an excerpt only. However, if you search on a character name (like "Urbanus") or a reasonably common word (like, say, "city"), you'll find it links you to occurrences throughout the book.]
08 March 2006
Game Plan
OK, so the brief political thought which follows would probably count as a conspiracy theory, if it were well enough thought through to count as a theory. And as such someone else may have thought of it already anyway.
But... I was reading this story in The Guardian, and I came upon the following quote from the U.S. ambassador to Iraq:
And then the aggressive war-game player in me thought, "That's a damn good strategy. Set up a contained arena far away from your own territory, provoke your most dangerous opponents into killing each other there, and then withdraw and leave them to it. Sure, you'll need to take on the victor eventually, but by that time you'll be in such a strong position they won't stand a chance."
Admittedly it involves some American fatalities in the meantime, but it's always been clear that this was an acceptable risk in achieving whatever the long-term goal actually is. The disruption of the oil supply might be considered a more serious concern (and it's one which Risk doesn't model, although as I recall Supremacy has a decent stab at it), but the U.S. has been making some serious effort recently to identify sources elsewhere, especially in its own oil-rich states of Texas and Alaska.
Taking it as read for the moment that George Bush is a man of -- at best -- short-sighted morals, who is advised by people very much more intelligent and ruthless than he is... how implausible is it, honestly, that this might be the long-term plan they have in mind? In these days of militant, outward-looking Islam, statesmen of Bush's father's generation must look back with some nostalgia to the good old days of the Iran-Iraq war.
Hell, it's what I'd do. Assuming, of course, that this was a board game.
But... I was reading this story in The Guardian, and I came upon the following quote from the U.S. ambassador to Iraq:
Mr Khalilzad suggested the situation [in Iraq] was so dangerous that without a substantial US presence, a civil war could suck in other Arab countries on the side of the Sunnis and Iran on the side of the Shias, creating conditions for a regional conflict and disrupting global oil supplies. "That would make Taliban Afghanistan look like child's play," he said.And the self-centred Westerner in me thought, "Well, at least that would keep them all occupied."
And then the aggressive war-game player in me thought, "That's a damn good strategy. Set up a contained arena far away from your own territory, provoke your most dangerous opponents into killing each other there, and then withdraw and leave them to it. Sure, you'll need to take on the victor eventually, but by that time you'll be in such a strong position they won't stand a chance."
Admittedly it involves some American fatalities in the meantime, but it's always been clear that this was an acceptable risk in achieving whatever the long-term goal actually is. The disruption of the oil supply might be considered a more serious concern (and it's one which Risk doesn't model, although as I recall Supremacy has a decent stab at it), but the U.S. has been making some serious effort recently to identify sources elsewhere, especially in its own oil-rich states of Texas and Alaska.
Taking it as read for the moment that George Bush is a man of -- at best -- short-sighted morals, who is advised by people very much more intelligent and ruthless than he is... how implausible is it, honestly, that this might be the long-term plan they have in mind? In these days of militant, outward-looking Islam, statesmen of Bush's father's generation must look back with some nostalgia to the good old days of the Iran-Iraq war.
Hell, it's what I'd do. Assuming, of course, that this was a board game.
06 February 2006
A Good Head of Steam
I love Wikipedia for its sense of community, its democratic ethos and its eclecticness. I love the fact that I have my own entry, which has been edited by a Danish computer scientist and a magistrate in Singapore. I love the fact that there's a project specifically dedicated to making the entries relating to Doctor Who as exhaustive as possible, and that a featured article can surprise me by bringing to my attention a culture I would never otherwise have had a clue about the existence of.
I do, however, take issue with the ideas expressed in its article on steampunk, and not having the time to edit said article to an appropriately scholarly standard at present, I intend to sound off about the fact here instead.
Feel free -- as if you wouldn't anyway -- to skip this entry if jargonistic criticobollocks concerning obscure contemporary subgenres of speculative fiction fails to interest you.
The article's basic definition -- "Fiction in the steampunk genre is set in the past, or a world resembling the past, in which modern technological paradigms occurred earlier in history, but were accomplished via the science already present in that time period" -- is actually a pretty good one, especially when qualified by the observation that steampunk is "usually set in an anachronistic Victorian or quasi-Victorian alternate history setting".
Clute and Nicholls' generally admirable Encyclopedia of Science Fiction simplifies this considerably, reducing it to "the modern subgenre whose sf events take place against a 19th-century background" [p1161]. This omits several elements which the Wikipedia entry has picked up on, including the fact that steampunk lends itself to alternative histories and that it typically -- and I would say essentially -- involves historically primitive science (often steam-driven, hence the name) taking on the functionality of modern or futuristic technologies (computers, long-distance communications, spacecraft). To be fair, though, Nicholls wrote the entry in 1993, when works of steampunk were rarer, wheras the Wikipedia article was last updated today. Clute and Paul J McAuley do better in 1997's Encyclopedia of Fantasy, where they classify the type as "technofantasy that is based, sometimes quite remotely, on technological anachronism" [p895].
The technological anachronism is, I'm convinced, the key to categorising works of S.F. as steampunk. As a genre, steampunk grew out of cyberpunk -- hence, obviously, the other half of the name -- and has the same interest in challenging authorities and creating countercultures by means including the technological. By showing these technologies arising before their time, and producing the resultant revolutions in thought against an anachronistic historical backdrop, steampunk questions the historical process by which heresies (scientific and otherwise) become orthodoxies, and countercultures enter the mainstream.
This is most obvious in one of the seminal works of steampunk, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine, which portrays a nineteenth-century information revolution centring around Charles Babbage's mechanical computer. This is explicitly contrasted with the real revolution in Victorian thinking which arose from the discovery of evolution, while the rebellious-poets-turned-establishment-politicians Shelley and Byron lay the basis for a future totalitarian regime. In an Epilogue the information itself evolves to become artifically sentient, and finds itself the tool used by this regime for the oppression of its human subjects.
All of this is fairly subtle, sophisticated stuff, and is something which the Wikipedians, dazzled by style and paying rather less attention to substance, seem entirely to have missed. As often as not the difficulty with Wikipedia lies in its very comprehensiveness, with the fact that reader / editors add to the corpus an awful lot more often than they take away. Thus the steampunk article has become ludicrously inclusive, extending the historical period and the generic referents far beyond the scope implied by that opening paragraph, to the point that it is no longer of much use to anyone.
If I were to define steampunk, I would suggest the following as essential criteria:
1. The technological anachronism of modern functionalities in a Victorian(ish) setting.
2. A strong grounding in real-world history, and the historical process.
3. A countercultural aesthetic, whether achieved directly or ironically.
The Wikipedia article is nothing like so rigorous. The idea that "the genre has expanded into medieval settings", for instance, shows a chronic (as well as a chronologic) misunderstanding of the genre's basis. The Victorian setting is important both thematically (the Victorian era itself being a time of rapid and catastrophic intellectual revolution) and aesthetically (thanks to the distinctiveness of its technologies). Extending the range to cover the whole of the nineteenth-century and the Edwardian era is probably fair enough, but a work like McAuley's Pasquale's Angel (where Leonardo da Vinci ushers in an early Industrial Revolution in Renaissance Florence), though splendid, can't be considered steampunk. I've heard it referred to as "clockpunk" as in "clockwork", which makes some sense, but it -- like "sandalpunk", "bronzepunk" and "stonepunk" -- can't be said to belong in the article.
There is a case for including works set in strongly Victorian-influenced alternative presents or futures, which rule themselves in through a close awareness of their Victorian roots and of the historical process mentioned in point 2.... but the suggested category of "fantasy steampunk", which fails altogether to engage with real-world history, is entirely spurious. A work like China Miéville's Perdido Street Station may have steam-powered A.I. robots in it, but they exist in a made-up setting alongside magicians, demons and human-animal hybrids. Its use of tropes taken from steampunk adds enormously to its richness of texture, but it's in no way an examination of technological revolution or shifts in historical thought. Instead, it uses some of the trappings of steampunk for purposes quite different from those of the genre.
Equally not steampunk, and for surprisingly similar reasons, is Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships, the "authorised sequel" to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine which I was mentioning just the other week. Whereas true steampunk arises from a close examination of the understanding and imagination of the Victorian era, Baxter's novel is essentially a work of modern hard S.F., replete with Dyson spheres, quantum multiverses, Gödelian logical systems and a complex explanation of the working physics of what was, for Wells, purely a philosophical and literary device. Wells' Time Traveller is used essentially as an ingénue to tour the universe Baxter wants to write about: what Wellsian touches there are (the "land leviathans" of the war-ravaged alternative 1930s, for instance, or the utopian social planning which the denizens of this era have in mind for when their War is over) are mere window-dressing on Baxter's late-twentieth-century story.
[The sharp-eyed may notice that the Wikipedia article against which I am supposedly railing does not, in fact, claim The Time Ships as a steampunk work. Oops. It's just that I'm rereading Baxter's novel at the moment, and this aspect of it -- the fact that it claims to be a sequel to Wells whilst in fact being the kind of novel Baxter thinks it would be more interesting if Wells had written instead -- is annoying me. I imagine some readers of Peculiar Lives may sympathise.]
This point is more widely applicable, however, as steampunk is always keen to analyse and problematise the era it's examining, and by extension the era in which it was written, giving rise to the "countercultural aesthetic" I've mentioned in point 3. As the article suggests, it might do so by techniques including dystopias or ironic utopias based on the principles of the time: it won't, however, achieve anything much by just providing a pulp-fiction romp through the era, which is why I'm suspicious of many of the films, TV programmes and rôle-playing games which the Wikipedians claim for the genre. There's very little that's countercultural or subversive about Back to the Future Part III, for example.
On the other hand, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen almost certainly does qualify thanks to its gleefully ironic recreation of the imperial and racial attitudes of the era -- despite the fact that it's set in the continuum of Victorian pulp fiction rather than that of the historical era. This brings me to another point, which I'd add as a non-essential fourth criterion, that all of my points above are served by a metatextual relationship with the fiction of the period: works of steampunk are frequently direct sequels to, incorporate characters from, or at the very least allude heavily to, the speculative and other fiction of the era. This is as true of The Difference Engine, which features characters from Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil, as it is of LoEG.
So. What texts would be on an essential steampunk reading list? I'll be honest: I haven't read enough of the recognised classics (although some of them, like Anti-Ice and The Space Machine are on my "read soon" list) to be sure. The Difference Engine would be there, certainly, as would the two volumes of LoEG, and Brian Aldiss' Frankenstein Unbound. Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time trilogy would make it, as perhaps would his Oswald Bastable trilogy (published in one volume as Nomad of the Time-Streams). I'm not convinced about Tim Powers' often-cited The Anubis Gates because of its heavy fantasy content, although it has been a couple of decades since I last read it -- almost as long as Harry Harrison's A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!, which I suspect should be on the list. It's obviously a work in progress.
As indeed are most of the opinions above. If anyone's managed to follow me so far, then I'd be intrigued to hear what you think.
I do, however, take issue with the ideas expressed in its article on steampunk, and not having the time to edit said article to an appropriately scholarly standard at present, I intend to sound off about the fact here instead.
Feel free -- as if you wouldn't anyway -- to skip this entry if jargonistic criticobollocks concerning obscure contemporary subgenres of speculative fiction fails to interest you.
The article's basic definition -- "Fiction in the steampunk genre is set in the past, or a world resembling the past, in which modern technological paradigms occurred earlier in history, but were accomplished via the science already present in that time period" -- is actually a pretty good one, especially when qualified by the observation that steampunk is "usually set in an anachronistic Victorian or quasi-Victorian alternate history setting".
Clute and Nicholls' generally admirable Encyclopedia of Science Fiction simplifies this considerably, reducing it to "the modern subgenre whose sf events take place against a 19th-century background" [p1161]. This omits several elements which the Wikipedia entry has picked up on, including the fact that steampunk lends itself to alternative histories and that it typically -- and I would say essentially -- involves historically primitive science (often steam-driven, hence the name) taking on the functionality of modern or futuristic technologies (computers, long-distance communications, spacecraft). To be fair, though, Nicholls wrote the entry in 1993, when works of steampunk were rarer, wheras the Wikipedia article was last updated today. Clute and Paul J McAuley do better in 1997's Encyclopedia of Fantasy, where they classify the type as "technofantasy that is based, sometimes quite remotely, on technological anachronism" [p895].
The technological anachronism is, I'm convinced, the key to categorising works of S.F. as steampunk. As a genre, steampunk grew out of cyberpunk -- hence, obviously, the other half of the name -- and has the same interest in challenging authorities and creating countercultures by means including the technological. By showing these technologies arising before their time, and producing the resultant revolutions in thought against an anachronistic historical backdrop, steampunk questions the historical process by which heresies (scientific and otherwise) become orthodoxies, and countercultures enter the mainstream.
This is most obvious in one of the seminal works of steampunk, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine, which portrays a nineteenth-century information revolution centring around Charles Babbage's mechanical computer. This is explicitly contrasted with the real revolution in Victorian thinking which arose from the discovery of evolution, while the rebellious-poets-turned-establishment-politicians Shelley and Byron lay the basis for a future totalitarian regime. In an Epilogue the information itself evolves to become artifically sentient, and finds itself the tool used by this regime for the oppression of its human subjects.
All of this is fairly subtle, sophisticated stuff, and is something which the Wikipedians, dazzled by style and paying rather less attention to substance, seem entirely to have missed. As often as not the difficulty with Wikipedia lies in its very comprehensiveness, with the fact that reader / editors add to the corpus an awful lot more often than they take away. Thus the steampunk article has become ludicrously inclusive, extending the historical period and the generic referents far beyond the scope implied by that opening paragraph, to the point that it is no longer of much use to anyone.
If I were to define steampunk, I would suggest the following as essential criteria:
1. The technological anachronism of modern functionalities in a Victorian(ish) setting.
2. A strong grounding in real-world history, and the historical process.
3. A countercultural aesthetic, whether achieved directly or ironically.
The Wikipedia article is nothing like so rigorous. The idea that "the genre has expanded into medieval settings", for instance, shows a chronic (as well as a chronologic) misunderstanding of the genre's basis. The Victorian setting is important both thematically (the Victorian era itself being a time of rapid and catastrophic intellectual revolution) and aesthetically (thanks to the distinctiveness of its technologies). Extending the range to cover the whole of the nineteenth-century and the Edwardian era is probably fair enough, but a work like McAuley's Pasquale's Angel (where Leonardo da Vinci ushers in an early Industrial Revolution in Renaissance Florence), though splendid, can't be considered steampunk. I've heard it referred to as "clockpunk" as in "clockwork", which makes some sense, but it -- like "sandalpunk", "bronzepunk" and "stonepunk" -- can't be said to belong in the article.
There is a case for including works set in strongly Victorian-influenced alternative presents or futures, which rule themselves in through a close awareness of their Victorian roots and of the historical process mentioned in point 2.... but the suggested category of "fantasy steampunk", which fails altogether to engage with real-world history, is entirely spurious. A work like China Miéville's Perdido Street Station may have steam-powered A.I. robots in it, but they exist in a made-up setting alongside magicians, demons and human-animal hybrids. Its use of tropes taken from steampunk adds enormously to its richness of texture, but it's in no way an examination of technological revolution or shifts in historical thought. Instead, it uses some of the trappings of steampunk for purposes quite different from those of the genre.
Equally not steampunk, and for surprisingly similar reasons, is Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships, the "authorised sequel" to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine which I was mentioning just the other week. Whereas true steampunk arises from a close examination of the understanding and imagination of the Victorian era, Baxter's novel is essentially a work of modern hard S.F., replete with Dyson spheres, quantum multiverses, Gödelian logical systems and a complex explanation of the working physics of what was, for Wells, purely a philosophical and literary device. Wells' Time Traveller is used essentially as an ingénue to tour the universe Baxter wants to write about: what Wellsian touches there are (the "land leviathans" of the war-ravaged alternative 1930s, for instance, or the utopian social planning which the denizens of this era have in mind for when their War is over) are mere window-dressing on Baxter's late-twentieth-century story.
[The sharp-eyed may notice that the Wikipedia article against which I am supposedly railing does not, in fact, claim The Time Ships as a steampunk work. Oops. It's just that I'm rereading Baxter's novel at the moment, and this aspect of it -- the fact that it claims to be a sequel to Wells whilst in fact being the kind of novel Baxter thinks it would be more interesting if Wells had written instead -- is annoying me. I imagine some readers of Peculiar Lives may sympathise.]
This point is more widely applicable, however, as steampunk is always keen to analyse and problematise the era it's examining, and by extension the era in which it was written, giving rise to the "countercultural aesthetic" I've mentioned in point 3. As the article suggests, it might do so by techniques including dystopias or ironic utopias based on the principles of the time: it won't, however, achieve anything much by just providing a pulp-fiction romp through the era, which is why I'm suspicious of many of the films, TV programmes and rôle-playing games which the Wikipedians claim for the genre. There's very little that's countercultural or subversive about Back to the Future Part III, for example.
On the other hand, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen almost certainly does qualify thanks to its gleefully ironic recreation of the imperial and racial attitudes of the era -- despite the fact that it's set in the continuum of Victorian pulp fiction rather than that of the historical era. This brings me to another point, which I'd add as a non-essential fourth criterion, that all of my points above are served by a metatextual relationship with the fiction of the period: works of steampunk are frequently direct sequels to, incorporate characters from, or at the very least allude heavily to, the speculative and other fiction of the era. This is as true of The Difference Engine, which features characters from Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil, as it is of LoEG.
So. What texts would be on an essential steampunk reading list? I'll be honest: I haven't read enough of the recognised classics (although some of them, like Anti-Ice and The Space Machine are on my "read soon" list) to be sure. The Difference Engine would be there, certainly, as would the two volumes of LoEG, and Brian Aldiss' Frankenstein Unbound. Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time trilogy would make it, as perhaps would his Oswald Bastable trilogy (published in one volume as Nomad of the Time-Streams). I'm not convinced about Tim Powers' often-cited The Anubis Gates because of its heavy fantasy content, although it has been a couple of decades since I last read it -- almost as long as Harry Harrison's A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!, which I suspect should be on the list. It's obviously a work in progress.
As indeed are most of the opinions above. If anyone's managed to follow me so far, then I'd be intrigued to hear what you think.
I Slam a Phobia
(I Slam, You Slam, We All Slam for Islam)
It's hardly a new observation, but I find these days that I have altogether more in common with liberal atheists, agnostics and members of other faiths than I have with hardline members of what's nominally my own religion. Certainly the organisation known as "Christian Voice" -- spuriously, since it appears to be a platform solely for the unpalatable views of one Stephen Green -- made me furious with its denunciation of Jerry Springer: The Opera.
It wasn't that JS:TO was necessarily any good (I haven't seen it, but opinions I read ranged roughly from "brilliant and inspired" to "inane drivel"), or that it wasn't offensive (again, not having seen it I can't comment, although it sounds as if some of the material would have been difficult to stomach even for an heretical christian like me) -- it's the idea of someone having the arrogance and gall to object to its existence on the grounds that they personally found it made them uncomfortable.
It's a work of fiction! It can't hurt you! Even if the author has different beliefs from yours, even if it makes jokes about your faith, even if it personally insults you, your God, your mother and your dog, IT CAN'T POSSIBLY DO ANYONE ANY HARM!
...I wanted to say.
Jesus himself was mocked, bodily humiliated and tortured to death for speaking his beliefs. Christianity seems to have survived that incident, and indeed could arguably be seen to have done rather well out of it. Is it really incumbent upon us, two thousand years later, to protect Jesus from verbal insults, to the extent of attempting to silence the beliefs of others?
(That was a rhetorical question, the answer to which is: "Of course it bloody isn't. Jesus Christ!")
All of which (apart from the Jesus-specific stuff, obviously) pretty much sums up my response to what the media assures us has been the "Islamic world"'s reaction to the cartoons of Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper. They're just funny drawings, people. They can't do you any harm, and unless you're actually Danish you would (originally) have had to go to considerable lengths just to find and be offended by them. The idea that the Danish government should override the right to free speech enshrined in its law and punish the cartoonists or the editors, in order to satisfy the calls for retribution emanating from people living for the most part thousands of miles away, is so wrong as to be grotesque.
There seems to be a conflation of two separate but linked issues. One is the fact of the newspaper printing images of Muhammad, which are forbidden in Islam; the other is the fact that some of the cartoons the newspaper chose are offensive, in a satirical sort of way, to Islam itself. To anyone other than a fairly fanatical Muslim, the first issue is pretty clearly a non-starter: non-Muslims in a non-Islamic country can hardly be expected to follow a moral code in which they have no interest whatosever. It's as absurd as the attempts of the religious right in the U.S. to impose christian values upon its secular population, except that there isn't even the justification that Denmark is historically an Islamic country.
The second point -- essentially, that freedom of speech brings with it a responsibility not to say gratuitously offensive things about other people's cherished beliefs -- is on the face of it a more reasonable proposition, and it's here that most of the more sympathetic Western commentators are focussing their attention.
As I've already suggested, I do understand what it's like to have one's beliefs insulted by other people for fun, although I haven't really felt it very strongly since I was about sixteen. (Watching The Life of Brian pretty much shook me out of it, to be honest.) Christians living in modern secular Britain have to develop a thick skin about the public representation of their faith, and rightly so. Our beliefs thrive through challenge: if they're worth anything at all, opposition will strengthen them, and that's no less true of opposition through mockery and satire, painful though it is to be on the receiving end of the same.
Some of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons are offensive, puerile and petty. I would feel hurt by them, were I someone who held Muhammad as a figure of reverence[*]. However, the gulf between "feeling hurt by something" and "calling for retribution to be visited upon the perpetrators of something" is one which would, I think, bear some degree of exploration.
If I seem to be suggesting that the Muslims who feel offended by these cartoons need to grow up and get the hell over it, then I'm afraid that that seems to me to be not a million miles from the truth.
Holding onto a religion -- any religion -- in the modern world means accepting that the vast majority of the population will disagree with you in principle, and differ from you (often radically) in practice. In prior centuries, individual societies may have been able to get along -- not usually very admirably -- as monocultures, suppressing the dissidents within their boundaries and having as little as possible to do with the infidels outside. The history of the twentieth century has ruled out this kind of isolationism forever.
It's almost too obvious an observation to actually make, but any philosophical system -- be it Christianity, Islam, communism, capitalism, anarchy or Flying Spaghetti Monsterism -- could be a utopia, provided everybody freely assented to it. The moment it imposes itself upon someone who doesn't, it becomes a tyranny.
It's equally obvious that no system is ever going to win over the souls of every human being on the planet. Although certain belief-systems have a built-in assumption that they can, whether the mechanism be the Second Coming or the triumph of the proletariat, the real problem comes with the assumption that any dissenting voice can safely be dismissed as that of a damned heretic, a victim of false consciousness, or (in extreme cases) the Devil himself.
This means, unfortunately, that contemporary Islam can only do one of three things:
1. Take over the world, suppressing dissent wherever it finds it and becoming the first global theocracy (assuming the Americans don't get there first). [NB: This would not be a good idea.]
3. Reform itself, abandon many of its proscriptions and absolutes and become a strong, liberal voice speaking up for basic human and spiritual values. (I'm convinced that this will happen, but hardly in my lifetime.)
3. Adapt to the contemporary pluralist global environment in the way that other belief-systems have had to, and stop throwing tantrums because other cultures refuse to play their games the way it wants to play them.
That last one is, I'm afraid, the only realistic option in the medium term. The more Muslims worldwide who come to realise this, the more congenial the twenty-first century will be for everybody.
And just in case it isn't obvious, all this goes for bloody Stephen Green as well.
[*] I confess that I have certain difficulties with the figure of Muhammad himself, as perhaps the most problematic of the founders of major world religions. Heaven knows Jesus' celibacy (as far as his recorded life-story goes) has caused christianity some difficulties down the centuries, and his pacifism is generally brushed under the carpet -- but at least he never led an army of conquest, and nobody has ever claimed that he married a nine-year-old. Still, I'm willing to accept that my mental image of Muhammad is very likely no more accurate than those presented in the Jyllands-Posten.
It's hardly a new observation, but I find these days that I have altogether more in common with liberal atheists, agnostics and members of other faiths than I have with hardline members of what's nominally my own religion. Certainly the organisation known as "Christian Voice" -- spuriously, since it appears to be a platform solely for the unpalatable views of one Stephen Green -- made me furious with its denunciation of Jerry Springer: The Opera.
It wasn't that JS:TO was necessarily any good (I haven't seen it, but opinions I read ranged roughly from "brilliant and inspired" to "inane drivel"), or that it wasn't offensive (again, not having seen it I can't comment, although it sounds as if some of the material would have been difficult to stomach even for an heretical christian like me) -- it's the idea of someone having the arrogance and gall to object to its existence on the grounds that they personally found it made them uncomfortable.
It's a work of fiction! It can't hurt you! Even if the author has different beliefs from yours, even if it makes jokes about your faith, even if it personally insults you, your God, your mother and your dog, IT CAN'T POSSIBLY DO ANYONE ANY HARM!
...I wanted to say.
Jesus himself was mocked, bodily humiliated and tortured to death for speaking his beliefs. Christianity seems to have survived that incident, and indeed could arguably be seen to have done rather well out of it. Is it really incumbent upon us, two thousand years later, to protect Jesus from verbal insults, to the extent of attempting to silence the beliefs of others?
(That was a rhetorical question, the answer to which is: "Of course it bloody isn't. Jesus Christ!")
All of which (apart from the Jesus-specific stuff, obviously) pretty much sums up my response to what the media assures us has been the "Islamic world"'s reaction to the cartoons of Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper. They're just funny drawings, people. They can't do you any harm, and unless you're actually Danish you would (originally) have had to go to considerable lengths just to find and be offended by them. The idea that the Danish government should override the right to free speech enshrined in its law and punish the cartoonists or the editors, in order to satisfy the calls for retribution emanating from people living for the most part thousands of miles away, is so wrong as to be grotesque.
There seems to be a conflation of two separate but linked issues. One is the fact of the newspaper printing images of Muhammad, which are forbidden in Islam; the other is the fact that some of the cartoons the newspaper chose are offensive, in a satirical sort of way, to Islam itself. To anyone other than a fairly fanatical Muslim, the first issue is pretty clearly a non-starter: non-Muslims in a non-Islamic country can hardly be expected to follow a moral code in which they have no interest whatosever. It's as absurd as the attempts of the religious right in the U.S. to impose christian values upon its secular population, except that there isn't even the justification that Denmark is historically an Islamic country.
The second point -- essentially, that freedom of speech brings with it a responsibility not to say gratuitously offensive things about other people's cherished beliefs -- is on the face of it a more reasonable proposition, and it's here that most of the more sympathetic Western commentators are focussing their attention.
As I've already suggested, I do understand what it's like to have one's beliefs insulted by other people for fun, although I haven't really felt it very strongly since I was about sixteen. (Watching The Life of Brian pretty much shook me out of it, to be honest.) Christians living in modern secular Britain have to develop a thick skin about the public representation of their faith, and rightly so. Our beliefs thrive through challenge: if they're worth anything at all, opposition will strengthen them, and that's no less true of opposition through mockery and satire, painful though it is to be on the receiving end of the same.
Some of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons are offensive, puerile and petty. I would feel hurt by them, were I someone who held Muhammad as a figure of reverence[*]. However, the gulf between "feeling hurt by something" and "calling for retribution to be visited upon the perpetrators of something" is one which would, I think, bear some degree of exploration.
If I seem to be suggesting that the Muslims who feel offended by these cartoons need to grow up and get the hell over it, then I'm afraid that that seems to me to be not a million miles from the truth.
Holding onto a religion -- any religion -- in the modern world means accepting that the vast majority of the population will disagree with you in principle, and differ from you (often radically) in practice. In prior centuries, individual societies may have been able to get along -- not usually very admirably -- as monocultures, suppressing the dissidents within their boundaries and having as little as possible to do with the infidels outside. The history of the twentieth century has ruled out this kind of isolationism forever.
It's almost too obvious an observation to actually make, but any philosophical system -- be it Christianity, Islam, communism, capitalism, anarchy or Flying Spaghetti Monsterism -- could be a utopia, provided everybody freely assented to it. The moment it imposes itself upon someone who doesn't, it becomes a tyranny.
It's equally obvious that no system is ever going to win over the souls of every human being on the planet. Although certain belief-systems have a built-in assumption that they can, whether the mechanism be the Second Coming or the triumph of the proletariat, the real problem comes with the assumption that any dissenting voice can safely be dismissed as that of a damned heretic, a victim of false consciousness, or (in extreme cases) the Devil himself.
This means, unfortunately, that contemporary Islam can only do one of three things:
1. Take over the world, suppressing dissent wherever it finds it and becoming the first global theocracy (assuming the Americans don't get there first). [NB: This would not be a good idea.]
3. Reform itself, abandon many of its proscriptions and absolutes and become a strong, liberal voice speaking up for basic human and spiritual values. (I'm convinced that this will happen, but hardly in my lifetime.)
3. Adapt to the contemporary pluralist global environment in the way that other belief-systems have had to, and stop throwing tantrums because other cultures refuse to play their games the way it wants to play them.
That last one is, I'm afraid, the only realistic option in the medium term. The more Muslims worldwide who come to realise this, the more congenial the twenty-first century will be for everybody.
And just in case it isn't obvious, all this goes for bloody Stephen Green as well.
[*] I confess that I have certain difficulties with the figure of Muhammad himself, as perhaps the most problematic of the founders of major world religions. Heaven knows Jesus' celibacy (as far as his recorded life-story goes) has caused christianity some difficulties down the centuries, and his pacifism is generally brushed under the carpet -- but at least he never led an army of conquest, and nobody has ever claimed that he married a nine-year-old. Still, I'm willing to accept that my mental image of Muhammad is very likely no more accurate than those presented in the Jyllands-Posten.
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