crytical

Tim Parks

Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos
A man driving through Catia, a violent slum in Caracas, Venezuela, 2005
Is the novel a space of intense engagement with the world, of risk and adventure? Or is it a place of refuge, of hanging back from life? The answer will be all too easy if we are living in a country that does not allow certain stories to be told. For Solzhenitsyn writing novels was indeed a serious risk. But in the West?
In my last piece in this space I considered the idea that our personalities are formed in communities of origin where one particular polarity of values or qualities tends to dominate—fear or courage, winning or losing, belonging or not belonging, good or evil. As each person seeks to stake out a position for himself in his community and later in the world outside, it will be the position he or she assumes in relation to that polarity that will be felt as the most defining and any problems in establishing such a position (am I a strong person or a weak one, am I part of the group or not?) will be experienced as especially troubling.
Now I want to toss out a provocation: that in the world of literature there is a predominance of people whose approach to life is structured around issues of fear and courage and who find it difficult to find a stable position in relation to those values. Not that they are necessarily more fearful than others, but that a sense of themselves as fearful or courageous is crucial for them and will be decisive in the structuring of both the content and style of their work.
That certain vocations attract a particular character type is evident enough. At the university where I work in Milan, we have two post-grad courses for language students, one in interpreting and one in translation. With some exceptions the difference in attitude and character between members of the two groups is evident. The students who come to translation are not looking to be out there in the fray of the conference, under the spotlights; they like the withdrawn, intellectual aspect of translation. Often their problem as they begin their careers is not so much the work itself, but the self-marketing required to find the work.
It’s also hardly revolutionary to suggest that literature can be seen simultaneously as an adventure and a refuge. Per Petterson’s novels often feature a conflicted, anxious, but would-be courageous character surrounded by reckless friends and enemies. In To Siberia the young female protagonist is excited by images of Siberia she finds in a children’s book and dreams of one day going there. Frightened of wartime developments around her—the novel is set in Denmark—she takes refuge in reading, in fantasizing future adventures, but twice loses her source of books, once when a rich friend who has a library of her own suddenly dies, and once when a lesbian librarian makes aggressive advances at her. The refuge of reading (which is full of virtual adventure) is threatened by real adventure and calamity.
Throughout Petterson’s work the main characters devote a great deal of time to practical tasks that will protect them from all kinds of dangers, or just the weather. They build huts and fires with immense care, because life is perilous, exciting, frightening. In the novel Fine By Me, a bildungsroman about a young Norwegian who looks for a way out of his depressing family situation in a life of writing, Petterson makes explicit that, as he sees it, the craft of writing, of carefully reconstructing life’s precariousness in sentences as solid and unassuming as bricks, is itself a way of building shelter: for those who see danger everywhere, literature is a place of refuge.
We could equally well look at a classic like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen is constantly frightened. The first time his name is used, his mother is demanding an apology. Rather than confronting her, he hides under the table. His aunt threatens to pull out his eyes if he doesn’t apologise. A page later he is frightened by the hurly burly of the rugby game. Pretending to participate because afraid of criticism, he actually hides on the edge of his line. The first time we see Stephen happy and relaxed it is on his own in the sick bay where he is no longer obliged to engage in life in any way. Here for the first time we see him quoting lines of poetry, fantasizing, imagining, escaping, and in particular turning an imagined funeral into something beautiful, through words.
Two to sing and two to pray
And two to carry my soul away.
How beautiful and sad that was! How beautiful the words were…
Terrified at Christmas lunch of the quarrel between the nationalist Mr. Casey and the fanatically Catholic Aunt Dante, Stephen focuses on the way the antagonists speak, the words they use, which allows him to keep out of the firing line, and creates an illusion of comfortable distance. Wishing to be a bold adolescent he goes to a prostitute; terrified by a Jesuit sermon on hell, he tries to be chaste and good. Eventually, courageously resisting all claims on his loyalty, he conceives of the vocation of the artist as someone beyond and above the factions. All the same he needs to justify himself imagining that his work will courageously “forge the uncreated consciousness” of his race; disengaging with all parties he will single-handedly, from the safe distance of other countries, change Ireland. He claims. The decision to move to writing can thus be conceived as courageous on the one hand, or motivated by fear of succumbing to forces that terrify him on the other; his writing is a space of refuge, but he insists that it is engaged in changing the world.
Or what about the curious case of Thomas Hardy’s first, unpublished novel? Having courageously left his village home to train as an architect in London, Hardy suddenly retreats to mother in Dorsetshire, pleading fatigue and illness (we have no record of any symptoms) and in 1867, aged 27, writes The Poor Man and the Lady, whose main character Will Strong, a bold Hardy alter ego, courts a rich man’s daughter, is chased away by the family, and launches himself pugnaciously into politics. Hardy described the book as a “dramatic satire of the squirearchy … the tendency of the writing being socialistic, not to say revolutionary.”
There are various accounts about why the novel was never published, but as Hardy has it, publication was offered, but the publisher’s reader, the novelist George Meredith, warned Hardy that the content was explosive and could damage his career. So, afraid of consequences he withdrew it. Courage dominates in the story of the strong-willed Will Strong, but not in Hardy’s dealing with his publishers; he is courageous only in so far as he supposes the work will not intersect with reality. He then set about writing the entirely innocuous comedy Under a Greenwood Tree. Later in his career Hardy did take on Victorian morals very courageously in Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, but was so harrowed by the aggressive reviews he received that he chose to stop writing fiction and turned to the much safer production of poetry. “No more novel-writing for me,” he remarked. “A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up to be shot at.”
One could name any number of novels in which the tension between a desire for and fear of intense experience is played out in all kinds of ways: J.M. Coetzee’s Youth and Damon Galgutt’s The Good Doctor are two contemporary novels that immediately come to mind; Coetzee’s characters are often eager to be tested by life, but at the same time afraid that they will be caught out, found to be lacking in courage. Peter Stamm’s novels (Unformed Landscape, On a Day Like This, and Seven Years) suggest how the need to create a narrative for our lives forces us towards moments of risk and engagement, while fear of those moments may lead us to fantasise rather than act, or to become hyper rational and cautious in our decision making. These antithetical energies, towards and away from adventure, are mirrored in the writing itself as Stamm sets the reader up for melodrama, then seems to do everything to avoid or postpone it, as if, like his characters, he would much prefer to plod quietly along with life’s routine, but knows that sooner or later, alas, a writer has to deliver the goods.
So much, then, for a fairly common theme in literature. It’s understandable that those sitting comfortably at a dull desk to imagine life at its most intense might be conflicted over questions of courage and fear. It’s also more than likely that this divided state of mind is shared by a certain kind of reader, who, while taking a little time out from life’s turmoil, nevertheless likes to feel that he or she is reading courageous books.
The result is a rhetoric that tends to flatter literature, with everybody over eager to insist on its liveliness and import. “The novel is the one bright book of life,” D H Lawrence tells us. “Books are not life,” he immediately goes on to regret. “They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.” Lawrence, it’s worth remembering, grew up in the shadow of violent parental struggles and would always pride himself on his readiness for a fight, regretting in one letter that he was too ill “to slap Frieda [his wife] in the eye, in the proper marital fashion,” but “reduced to vituperation.” Frieda, it has to be said, gave as good as she got. In any event words just weren’t as satisfying as blows, though Lawrence did everything he could to make his writing feel like a fight: “whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage,” he insisted.
In How Fiction Works James Wood tells us that the purpose of fiction is “to put life on the page” and insists that “readers go to fiction for life.” Again there appears to be an anxiety that the business of literature might be more to do with withdrawal; in any event one can’t help thinking that someone in search of life would more likely be flirting, traveling or partying. How often on a Saturday evening would the call to life lift my head from my books and have me hurrying out into the street.
This desire to convince oneself that writing is at least as alive as life itself, was recently reflected by a New York Times report on brain-scan research that claims that as we read about action in novels the relative areas of the brain—those that respond to sound, smell, texture, movement, etc.—are activated by the words. “The brain, it seems,” enthuses the journalist, “does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.”
What nonsense! As if reading about sex or violence in any way prepared us for the experience of its intensity. (In this regard I recall my adolescent daughter’s recent terror on seeing our border collie go into violent death throes after having eaten some poison in the countryside. As the dog foamed at the mouth and twitched, Lucy was shivering, weeping, appalled. But day after day she reads gothic tales and watches horror movies with a half smile on her lips.)
The same New York Times article quotes Keith Oatley, a cognitive psychologist and, significantly, “a published novelist” who claims that “reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers…. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.”
If Oatley genuinely believes this I suspect he is not a very good novelist, novels being largely about form and convention. Halfway through Seven Years Peter Stamm, who I believe is an excellent novelist, has his narrator describe his oddly quiet and passive mistress thus:
My relationship with Ivona had been from the start, nothing other than a story, a parallel world that obeyed my will, and where I could go wherever I wanted, and could leave when I’d had enough.
Nothing other than a story. How disappointing. How reassuring. The passage seems to be worded in such a way as to suggest the author’s own frustration with his quiet and safe profession. But a mistress is a mistress, and a novel a novel. To ask her or it to be more than that would be to ask the mistress to become a wife, and the novel a life. Which it can never be.
nyrb.com 12.05.2011

Will the phone-hacking scandal be bigger than Watergate? This is a gobsmacking account of the problems engulfing News International
Even if you are familiar with the News of the World phone-hacking saga, you will be gobsmacked by this account. It is a tale of stupidity, incompetence, fear, intimidation, lying, downright wickedness and corruption in high places. It is constructed like a thriller, with cliffhanging chapter endings and a final section entitled “Darker and darker”. Men and women fear for their lives and their families, remove batteries from their mobiles, keep their blinds down and curtains closed, check their homes for bugging devices, see sinister vehicles in rear-view mirrors, and vary their routes to work each day. Vivid characters hop on and off stage, one of them a former policeman running a private detective agency called Silent Shadow. There’s even a murder. The improbable hero, doggedly pursuing his quarry, is the portly Labour MP Tom Watson – “the tub of lard”, Rupert Murdoch’s papers called him, in the charming way they have with people they don’t like. Rather confusingly, he’s also (with an Independent journalist) the co-author, but referred to throughout in the third person.
The book opens with a quote from Carl Bernstein, one of the Washington Post journalists who unearthed Watergate, comparing phone-hacking to that celebrated scandal. The parallels are indeed close, right down to the allegation that News International (NI) eventually bugged Rebekah Brooks, its own chief executive, just as Richard Nixon bugged his own White House office. In both scandals, dirty work was done by low-level operatives. Paper (or electronic) trails couldn’t establish conclusively that they acted on orders from above. But in phone hacking, as in the Watergate burglary, top people (we still don’t know how near the top the trail will lead) implicated themselves through a systematic cover-up. With a bit of stretch, you could argue that hacking may yet turn out to be bigger than Watergate. Nixon may have been leader of the world’s most powerful nation but he was, so to speak, just a rogue president. The products of Murdoch’s global media corporation, on the other hand, are consumed annually by a billion people, and the hacking cover-up appears to have encompassed not just one political leader but the entire British political establishment, to say nothing of the police, the legal services and much of the media.
What stands out from this book is the lengths to which NI went to bury the hacking scandal and how, before the revelations in July 2011 that Milly Dowler‘s phone was hacked, the company nearly got away with it. Clive Goodman, the NoW’s royal reporter, was jailed in January 2007, along with the private detective Glenn Mulcaire. The police had evidence that Mulcaire’s targets went well beyond the royal family and that, almost certainly, many reporters other than Goodman were involved. Yet no proper investigation followed, and no more arrests until 2011. The police deployed, on different occasions, a range of implausible excuses: they were too busy investigating terrorism; Mulcaire had actually hacked only “a handful” of the phone numbers he held; the law allowed prosecution only where a voice message was intercepted before the owner heard it.
Perhaps they were just frightened. When police raided the NoW offices in the wake of Goodman’s arrest, they faced a hostile, unco-operative and (some thought) potentially violent response. In effect, they were sent packing, and didn’t dare return. As revelations grew, NI’s response was, first, to deny them, second, to put pressure on newspapers and MPs to drop their investigations (pressure that was complemented by the advice of senior police officers) and third, to take further steps to cover its tracks.
In November 2009, NI agreed a policy of deleting “unhelpful” emails from its internal computer system. “How are we doing with the email deletion policy?” asked an anxious senior executive nearly a year later. Around the same time, the company was smashing up reporters’ computers during “a routine technical upgrade”. In January 2011, an email chain to James Murdoch, then chief executive of News Corp Europe and Asia, regarding Gordon Taylor, the footballers’ union official who was paid £645,000 to keep the hacking of his phone out of the public domain, was deleted as part of a “stabilisation and modernisation programme”. Emails were still being deleted up to the NoW’s closure in July 2011, as a technology firm used by NI testified to the home affairs select committee. No wonder a judge in January this year, rejecting a request to halt a search of computers belonging to former NoW employees, said the company should be treated as “deliberate destroyers of evidence”.
All the while, the Murdoch papers and their allies were pooh-poohing hacking stories published by the Guardian and other papers. Roger Alton, executive editor of the Times and a former Observer and Independent editor, compared the NoW’s offences to parking in a resident’s bay; Kelvin MacKenzie, the former Sun editor, to stealing tools from a garden shed. Boris Johnson, mayor of London, described Guardian allegations as “a load of codswallop cooked up by the Labour party” and in April 2011 his aide Kit Malthouse was still pressing Sir Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan police commissioner, to ignore “political media hysteria”, in Stephenson’s phrase.
NI had allies and clients in the right places. When the Guardian’s Nick Davies published the first stories in 2009 suggesting that NoW hacking was on an industrial scale, both Labour and the Tories were anxiously seeking Murdoch’s backing in the 2010 general election. The NoW had 10 former employees in Scotland Yard’s public affairs department. It had its former editor Andy Coulson in David Cameron’s office. Actors, who were among the main victims of hacking, are biddable people at the best of times and would hesitate to challenge publicly the owner of a Hollywood film studio. As for the fearless seekers of truth in the fourth estate, few wanted to kill for ever their chances of employment on Murdoch’s numerous papers and broadcast news stations in Britain and the US. Whistleblowers? When a former NoW employee spilled the beans to the New York Times, the police interviewed him under caution (by contrast, Coulson was initially questioned only as “a witness”). The whistleblower later died of drink-related disease.
If all else failed, Murdoch’s papers possessed the ultimate deterrent: the threat to investigate and publish details of the private lives of anybody who crossed them. Even those whose cupboards were empty of skeletons feared their families might be vulnerable. That is what gives a dominant media company its unique power: in effect, it can, tacitly if not explicitly, blackmail almost anybody, and it’s no use going to the police because, if they’re not actually being paid by the press, they’re scared too. The fear probably outstrips the reality, but not many risked it. One hostile biography of Rupert Murdoch, published in 2008, was followed by a Murdoch-owned US tabloid exposing the author’s extramarital affair. Neville Thurlbeck, the former NoW chief reporter, told Watson that an editor instructed staff to “find out every single thing you can about every single member” of the Commons media select committee of which Watson was a member. The paper hired Silent Shadow to follow Watson’s every move, and later used the same firm to put lawyers acting for hacking victims under surveillance. Both Andy Hayman and John Yates, the senior Met officers who chose not to challenge NI’s denials of mass criminality at the NoW, are said to have had controversial personal relationships, and both had their phones hacked (though they explicitly denied that fear influenced their decisions).
The saga is nowhere near its end. No sooner does NI settle with one group of hacking victims than more emerge. The prime minister’s loss of Coulson has been followed by a threat to his culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt. Police inquiries have extended to computer hacking, illegal acquisition of private data and corruption of police and other public officials. The number of arrests is closing on the half-century mark. It seems likely that Murdoch and his family will be forced to sell all their British papers, probably their interests in BSkyB and possibly even News Corporation itself. Nothing is forever, not even Murdoch. But nobody can be confident that he won’t bounce back. Many twists in the plot are still to come. This book covers just the first, enthralling instalment. The sequels could be even more dramatic.

Peter Wilby

guardian.co.uk

30.4.2012

“One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting…It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.”
George Orwell Homage to Catalonia
3.4.2012

THOU still unravish’d bride of quietness
 
  Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
 
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
 
  A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
 
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape

  Of deities or mortals, or of both,
 
    In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
 
  What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
 
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
 
    What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

 
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
 
  Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
 
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
 
  Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
 
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

  Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
 
    Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
 
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
 
    She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
 
  For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

 
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
 
  Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
 
And, happy melodist, unwearièd,
 
  For ever piping songs for ever new;
 
More happy love! more happy, happy love!

  For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
 
    For ever panting, and for ever young;
 
All breathing human passion far above,
 
  That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
 
    A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

 
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
 
  To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
 
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
 
  And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
 
What little town by river or sea-shore,

  Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
 
    Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
 
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
 
  Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell
 
    Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

 
O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede
 
  Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
 
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
 
  Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
 
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

  When old age shall this generation waste,
 
    Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
 
  Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st
 
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
 
    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know

“You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.  That’s not the way the world really works anymore.  We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.  We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The New York Times 2005

MARCH 9, 2012

Clean water is often taken for granted despite growing evidence that it is threatened in many parts of the world by either environmental contamination and/or socioeconomic problems, such as poverty, which often tend to go hand in hand.  Arsenic contaminated ground water used for drinking and cooking is commonplace in many parts of Bangladesh.  Like other chemical elements known to be poisonous to humans, arsenic is tolerated to some degree, but beyond certain thresholds ingesting arsenic is toxic leading to risk of disease and death.
Arsenic contaminated groundwater currently threatens the health of 70 million people in 61 of 64 districts in Bangladesh.  Many people living in districts plagued with arsenic contaminated ground water regularly drink water with concentrations of arsenic far above national and WHO standards. An important study from Prof Peter Atkins and Dr Manzurul Hassan explores how groundwater arsenic concentration varies throughout areas of southwest Bangladesh.  Understanding the scale of arsenic contamination, the complex processes that lead to arsenic in groundwater and how arsenic spreads over time is currently needed to reduce arsenic-related health risks.  The study reveals a highly uneven spatial pattern of arsenic concentrations that can inform government policy for addressing where high levels of arsenic contamination occur in order to mitigate arsenic poisoning, a health and social hazard.  358 of the 375 tubewells sampled in the study had concentrations of arsenic of at least .05 mg/L and only 17 of the tubewells (4.50 percent) sampled are considered arsenic-safe. This is a large health concern for people living in areas of Bangladesh where the only source of water they have is contaminated with arsenic that is either above or well above the WHO standard (<0.01 mg/L), but also the limit set by the government of Bangladesh (0.05 mg/L).
Using either threshold shows the degree of arsenic contamination tolerated in parts of the country where many people live.  In this study only four tubewells were found to meet the WHO permissible limit.  The average concentration of arsenic for the areas studied is 0.248 mg/L, 25 times higher than the WHO permissible limit.  These concentrations normally varied with depth.
Tubewell depths measured in the study range between 18-200 m.  A deep aquifer is normally above 144.5 m, while a shallow aquifer is equal to or less than this depth.  The samples were taken using an advanced laboratory method to ensure accuracy (FI-HG-AAS).  In the study, these methods have a minimum detection limit of .001 mg/L and are capable of measuring down to .003mg/L which works well for detecting arsenic contamination at or above permissible levels.
The study found arsenic-safe zones in the north, central and south part of the study area in Ghona Union, Satkhira District located in southwest Bangladesh close to the Indian border, but concentrations of arsenic were scattered throughout.  Generally, arsenic-safe zones lie in higher elevations, while the most contaminated areas are low-lying and used for agriculture.  The reason for varied concentrations of arsenic in different parts of the research site may be due to geological influences such as differences in texture of the aquifers and/or aquifer chemistry.  About 46 percent of tubewells are located within 25 m of each other within the study site.
While there are a number of theories as to why there is such large variation in contamination the specific cause is currently unknown.  The pattern of arsenic concentration actually ‘varied considerably and unpredictably over a distance of a few metres’, according to the study.  Arsenic contamination varied with grain-size distribution, which means the concentration was different depending on whether the sediment below the surface consisted of very fine to medium-sized sand grains.  Previous studies have shown a variation in the relationship between grain size and arsenic concentration.  This study found arsenic concentration highest in fine to medium size sand grains.
The study area covers only 18 km2, but has a population of 13,287 (recorded in 1991).  Arsenic contaminated zones were concentrated primarily in the west and northeast parts of the study area.  While contamination zones were found everywhere in the study area, the degree of contamination decreased from west to east.  What few safe zones exist are concentrated in the south.  Modelling used in the study revealed that less arsenic was found for tube wells at greater depths, but in some cases low levels of arsenic were found in deep aquifers and there is no guarantee that they cannot be contaminated with arsenic in time.  Other studies have shown that older wells tend to have a probability of higher arsenic concentrations.  A previous study found that only 1 percent of tubewells deeper than 200 m have arsenic above .05mg/L, the WHO standard, but in the study from Hassan and Atkins 75 percent of deep tube wells were above this threshold for arsenic-safe drinking water.  While greater depth is still important in terms of accessing arsenic-safe water, arsenic has been found to be wholly absent at depths less than 5 m, particularly in dug wells.
While this study along with others finds that multiple levels of arsenic contamination are present at different depths and are dependent on geological factors, more research is needed on how arsenic moves through ground water systems within different areas of Bangladesh.  Whether the variation in local geology is the main cause of the measured differences in arsenic concentration is still an open question.  If answered, it can likely assist government, NGOs and communities in addressing the arsenic problem at a much greater scale than at present.
References and Further Reading:
Application of geostatistics with Indicator Kriging for analysing spatial variability of groundwater arsenic concentrations in Southwest Bangladesh. Journal of Environmental Science and Health, Part A: Toxic/Hazardous Substances and Environmental Engineering.
Groundwater arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh: An interview with Dr Manzurul Hassan. IHRR
Contamination of drinking-water by arsenic in Bangladesh: a public health emergency. World Health Organisation
ihrrblog.org 11.3.2011

Kevin Rudd has now lost everything there is to lose in politics – everything except his seat, of course.
And his fall from political grace has been every bit as spectacular and self-caused as his ascension to the leadership of the ALP in the first place.
I’ve watched the rise and fall of Rudd with some interest for the last six years, ever since the publication of his now infamous essay on “Faith in Politics,” and I’ll confess that I was no more impressed by what seemed to me to be the self-serving way he made use of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in that essay (about which I’ll say more below) than I was by his politically anaemic campaign to unseat John Howard in 2007, or by what struck me as a morally shallow “apology” to Aboriginal Australians in 2008.
In each instance, there seemed to me clear evidence of a politician fully in the grip of what Max Weber called the political equivalent of the “sin against the Holy Spirit” – vanity.
As Weber wrote almost a century ago in his justly famed essay, “Politics as a Vocation”:
“For ultimately there are only two kinds of mortal sin in the field of politics: the lack of commitment to a cause and the lack of a sense of responsibility that is often, but not always, identical with it. Vanity, the need to thrust oneself centre stage, is what is most likely to lead the politician into the temptation of committing either or both of these sins. All the more, as the demagogue is forced to play for ‘effect’. Because he is concerned only with the ‘impression’ he is making, he always runs the risk both of turning into an actor and of taking too lightly his responsibility for his own actions.”
For Weber, vanity fundamentally corrupts the three qualities that must all be in harness for politics to be an authentic, much less successful, vocation: passion (the dedication to a cause), a sense of responsibility (owning consequences of one’s decisions, and thus refuses to indulge in politics as a mere “intellectual game” or fit of “sterile excitement”) and a sense of proportion (“the ability to allow realities to impinge on you while maintaining an inner calm and composure”). By uncoupling passion from the others, and thus exaggerating its presence in the political persona, vanity allows the politician to become intoxicated on the spectacle of his own virtue.
In the case of Kevin Rudd, however, such garden variety political vanity is given a peculiarly theological twist. And it is here, I think, that we come tantalisingly close to the key to the Rudd enigma: just what is it that fuels his seemingly inextinguishable political drive?
This question was, of course, the subject of David Marr’s meticulously well-timed 2010 Quarterly Essay, Power Trip: The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd. According to Marr, Rudd’s drive is a kind of sublimated attempt to overcome the humiliations he suffered as a child, and as such, it has endowed him with an astonishing emotional resilience. But Marr insists, famously, that what fuels this drive is also the core ingredient of the Rudd psyche: anger.
“Rudd is driven by anger. It’s the juice in the machine… Who is the real Kevin Rudd? He is the man you see when the anger vents. He’s a politician with rage at his core, impatient rage.”
However, in terms of its explanatory power, this conclusion is both overstated and unconvincing. Some puerile resentment stemming from childhood traumas explains nothing about Kevin Rudd because it explains everything. And Marr clearly erred in seeing it everywhere, coiled around the disparate elements of Rudd’s story, providing them the artificial consistency of a mediocre psychodrama. (In an especially pleading moment, Marr reports one of Rudd’s teachers as saying, “I remember teaching him about Caesar’s troubles with Pompey the Great, and young Kevin was angered by Pompey’s poor behaviour.”)
Unfortunately for Marr, his fixation with Rudd’s subterranean rage meant that he didn’t know quite what to make of those truly original observations that occur within his otherwise rather unoriginal, and ultimately overrated, essay. One such observation was well worth exploring, instead of just throwing away:
“What it is about Rudd and martyrs? It’s a fascination that goes all the way back to his school days… Could there be somewhere in him the death wish of a pious schoolboy: some trace of an old hankering to go out in a blaze of moral glory?”
Whether it be the calmly defiant Thomas More of Robert Bolt’s The Man for All Seasons or Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s brave resistance to the Nazi regime or the political assassination of Gough Whitlam, martyrs seem to function as a kind of idee fixe for Kevin Rudd. They order Rudd’s political passions.
But – and here’s the crucial point – it is not that Rudd wants to be a martyr in some masochistic or Icarian way. Rather, he wants to see himself through the eyes of the adoring throng that venerates the martyrs. After all, the underlying fantasy of martyrdom is that one can somehow outlive one’s death and be witness to one’s own vindication – and, by extension, to the abject humiliation of one’s enemies. This vainglorious lust for renown is also the great temptation of martyrs, the inherent perversion of their act.
As Augustine argued at length in The City of God, what distinguishes the witness of the apostles and martyrs from the “Roman heroes” is the fact that the virtue, righteous acts and finally the purpose for which they died is hidden from the martyrs themselves; whereas, for the heroes venerated by Rome, “What else was there for them to love save glory? For, through glory, they desired to have a kind of life after death on the lips of those who praised them.”
None recognised the potency of this temptation quite so clearly as TS Eliot. In Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot’s play about the martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas Becket, three Tempters confront Becket attempting to dissuade him from his act of defiance to the King, which will most certainly cost him his life. He rebuffs each of their advances. But then a Fourth Tempter arrives. “What is your counsel?” asks Becket. The Tempter urges him to embrace martyrdom:
But think, Thomas, think of glory after death.
When king is dead, there’s another king,
And one more king is another reign.
King is forgotten, when another shall come:
Saint and Martyr rule from the tomb.
Think, Thomas, think of enemies dismayed,
Creeping in penance, frightened of a shade;
Think of pilgrims, standing in line
Before the glittering jewelled shrine,
From generation to generation
Bending the knee in supplication,
Think of the miracles, by God’s grace,
And think of your enemies, in another place.
Thomas is thus urged paradoxically to succumb to martyrdom, but to do so out of vanity and the longing for vengeance.
What can compare with the glory of Saints
Dwelling forever in the presence of God?
What earthly glory, of king or emperor,
What earthly pride, that is not poverty
Compared with richness of heavenly grandeur?
Seek the way of martyrdom, make yourself the lowest
On earth, to be high in heaven.
And see far off below you, where the gulf is fixed,
Your persecutors, in timeless torment,
Parched passion, beyond expiation.
What else was Kevin Rudd’s appeal to his vast support among “ordinary folk,” even in the face of certain death at the hands of caucus, or his interminable and grotesquely plaintive litanies of achievement at his final press conferences as prime minister and then foreign minister, or his posturing on the world stage and his penchant for grand (but finally empty) symbolic gestures, but the expression of this longing for a kind of life after political death; like the Roman heroes, to live on “on the lips of those who praised them.”
But this obsession with the “glory of the martyrs,” it seems to me, was fully evident in his 2006 essay on “Faith in Politics.” As an appreciative engagement with Bonhoeffer, the essay is incredibly poor. It represents little more than shapeless chunks of Bonhoeffer’s best-known quotes floating in a thin gruel of sanctimonious prose. And it certainly doesn’t indicate any deep engagement either with Bonhoeffer or with the vexed question of the relationship of Christianity and politics.
But Rudd’s essay ultimately wasn’t trying to do either of these things. As David Marr rightly observed, its real intent was to embellish Rudd’s much-publicised attack on the integrity of the Howard government – which had come under particular scrutiny through the AWB scandal – with a kind of heroic overlay. Rudd was depicting himself as the Bonhoeffer to Howard’s Nazi regime. In other words, his appeal to Bonhoeffer was entirely self-referential.
It is worth recalling, on this point, Alasdair MacIntyre’s criticism of the various attempts of liberal theologians in the 1960s – of which Bishop John Robinson, author of Honest to God, and in our time John Shelby Spong, are two of the more pernicious examples – to sex-up their mediocre variety of soft-left pseudo-radicalism by appealing to the theological language and moral experience of “extreme” figures such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
The same can be said for Kevin Rudd. And this goes not just for his self-serving use of Bonhoeffer, but also his subsequent predilection for high-blown moral language – whether it be his now notorious description of climate change as “the great moral challenge of our time,” to his characterisation of neo-liberalism as “that particular brand of free-market fundamentalism, extreme capitalism and excessive greed which became the economic orthodoxy of our time,” to his most recent positioning of himself as the only one who could “save the Australian Labor Party… and save the country from the ravages of an Abbott government”. By raising the moral and political stakes through the roof, Rudd casts himself in an impossibly heroic posture; and if he fails, he achieves the glory of political martyrdom for a higher cause.
I thus find myself, slightly unnervingly, in profound agreement with Alexander Downer’s assessment: it’s not power that drives Rudd, or anger. It’s the lust for fame, for recognition, for glory.
One can only imagine how different it could have been if Kevin Rudd’s Christianity had been more than an ornament on his political ambition. Had he paid better attention to Catholic teaching on martyrdom, or even read Bonhoeffer a little more carefully, perhaps he would have recognised the grave, indeed mortal, dangers involved when, as Bonhoeffer put it, “I make myself the observer of my own prayer”. And that the test of the political and Christian virtue is when their “righteousness … is hidden from themselves.”
But as it stands, Rudd is no political martyr, much less a messiah. He is just a politician who wanted people to love and praise him, and who tried to use his tenuous grasp of the Christian faith to achieve that end.
Scott Stephens is the Online Editor of Religion and Ethics for the ABC
abc.net.au The Drum
5.3.20012

In 1699, Jonathan Swift — author of, most notably, Gulliver’s Travels — penned the following list of resolutions, titled, “When I come to be old.” At the time of writing, he was 32 years of age.
(Source: Tale of a Tub.)

Transcript
When I come to be old. 1699.
Not to marry a young Woman. 
Not to keep young Company unless they reely desire it. 
Not to be peevish or morose, or suspicious. 
Not to scorn present Ways, or Wits, or Fashions, or Men, or War, &c. 
Not to be fond of Children, or let them come near me hardly. 
Not to tell the same story over and over to the same People. 
Not to be covetous. 
Not to neglect decency, or cleenlyness, for fear of falling into Nastyness. 
Not to be over severe with young People, but give Allowances for their youthfull follyes and weaknesses. 
Not to be influenced by, or give ear to knavish tatling servants, or others. 
Not to be too free of advise, nor trouble any but those that desire it. 
To desire some good Friends to inform me wch of these Resolutions I break, or neglect, and wherein; and reform accordingly. 
Not to talk much, nor of my self. 
Not to boast of my former beauty, or strength, or favor with Ladyes, &c. 
Not to hearken to Flatteryes, nor conceive I can be beloved by a young woman, et eos qui hereditatem captant, odisse ac vitare. 
Not to be positive or opiniative. 
Not to sett up for observing all these Rules; for fear I should observe none.

listsofnote.com 2.3.2012

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Malise Ruthven

Bibliothèque Nationale de France
A detail from the Catalan Atlas, attributed to the Majorcan Jewish cartographer Abraham Cresques, 1375
Over the next two months the great domed interior of what used to be the British Museum’s reading room, where Marx researched Das Kapital and Bram Stoker (creator of Dracula) was a reader, is host to Hajj, a remarkable exhibition that celebrates the most sacred event in the Islamic calendar, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The exhibition seems more than a cultural event—a milestone, perhaps, in the public recognition and acceptance of Islam at the heart of British life. Conceived by British Museum director Neil MacGregor and the museum’s Islamic art curator Venetia Porter with assistance from the Saudi Arabian government, it is an unusual collaboration between a museum dedicated to secular learning and the current rulers of Islam’s holiest sites, who have lent many important works.
Presiding over its opening in late January were Prince Abdulaziz bin Abdullah, deputy Saudi foreign minister and son of the Saudi King, and Prince Charles—the heir to the British throne. There was a pleasing irony in the ceremony’s being held (with soft drinks only) in the gallery devoted to the eighteenth century Enlightenment with the princes reading their speeches in front of a Roman statue of the goddess Minerva. Prince Charles, who will presumably be the next Supreme Governor of the Church of England, spoke of the show’s “timeless truth that all life is rooted in the unity of our Creator.” Prince Abdulaziz—by Saudi standards an enlightened figure who sponsors translations of scientific texts into and out of Arabic—referred to his country’s “tangible efforts to spread peace all over the world,” a comment that raised few eyebrows from the assembled ranks of the British establishment, despite recent Saudi efforts to help the ruling Sunni dynasty in Bahrain suppress demonstrations by mainly Shiite protestors.
But while there were political implications, this was not in any strict sense, a political forum and in any case British royals, including Prince Charles, appear more comfortable with the hereditary rulers of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, whom they regard as kindred spirits, than the uncertainties unleashed by the Arab Spring.
Hajj was organised in partnership with the King Abdul Aziz Public Library in Riyadh, which facilitated the loan of objects from Saudi Arabia, and helped with some of the texts, as Porter explained. (Funding came from the HSBC Amanah bank and the British government’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.) And while Saudi Arabian officials had no role in the choice or presentation of other objects loaned from more than thirty other collections, the organisers have clearly gone to some lengths to accommodate Saudi sensitivities and to undergird the monarch’s role as Guardian of Islam’s two holiest shrines (namely Mecca, where Muhammad was born and Medina where he is buried).
One of five obligatory “pillars” of the Islamic faith, the Hajj unites Muslims from all classes, backgrounds and traditions. It includes the ritual circumambulation of the Ka‘ba, the cubular building that stands at the centre of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, in the direction of which Muslims in all parts of the world face during daily prayers, as well as other demanding rituals conducted in the neighbourhood of Mecca.

Abdel-Haleem Said
Graffiti depicting the Hajj on a house in al-Asadiyya, Egypt, 2010
The Ka’ba is a somewhat stark flat-roofed structure, fifty feet high with a forty-foot façade and slightly shorter side walls, constructed from the layers of the grey-blue stone found in the hills surrounding Mecca. As the captions in the exhibition state, Muslims believe it was built by Abraham (Ibrahim), the original monotheist and with his son Ishmael (Ismail) ancestor of the Arabs). Abraham is said to have instituted monotheism and ordained the pilgrimage at God’s command, but later generations fell away, allowing idol worship to prevail until Muhammad “restored” the true religion of Abraham. The show does not mention the scholarly questions that have been raised about the Abrahamic account. The Encyclopaedia of Islam—the canonical source for non-believers, states that “aside from Muslim traditions, practically nothing is known of the history of the Ka‘ba,” although Mecca (under the name Macorba) is mentioned in Ptolemy’s Geography, so it is assumed that the shrine existed in the second century CE.
In imitation of the tawaf (the ritual of circumambulation around the Ka’ba, which is performed by pilgrims by walking seven times around it in a counter-clockwise direction) the visitor to the beautifully-designed exhibition glides up a curving gallery, to encounter a series of displays showing the history of the Hajj through the ages. A Saudi lady, who had performed the pilgrimage several times, told me the experience brought tears to her eyes: “When you enter this exhibition you feel you are entering Mecca”—a city forbidden to non-Muslims, including the British Museum people who curated the show. The exhibits include artifacts, maps, textiles, documents from some forty collections, including those loaned from Saudi Arabia, notably the great kiswa, the black silken hanging embroidered with gold calligraphy, that covers the building.

Nasser D. Khalili Collection
Mahmal, red silk with silver and gold thread on a wooden frame, Cairo, 1867-1876.
Until the Saudi occupation of Mecca in 1926 the kiswa was sent annually from Cairo in a richly decorated camel-borne palanquin known as the mahmal, of which the exhibition has a superb example. Archive footage from 1918 shows the pomp with which this august aniconic symbol of Islamic devotion began its journey.. An edited version of Journey to Mecca, a recent Imax film, conveys some powerful images of Islamic faith in action: the ritual of prostration, honed over fifteen centuries – as the believers bow in perfectly coordinated movements in circles that radiate outwards from the Ka‘ba; the standing at the sacred mount of Arafat outside Mecca, which the white-robed pilgrims cover completely, like some vast colony of sea-birds; and a speeded-up view of the tawaf, where the Ka‘ba stands majestically—like the mysterious black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001—an otherworldly symbol surrounded by the blurred gyrations of the worshippers.
The impression is underscored by a striking statement about the merging of individual identities in the mass by the Shiite intellectual Ali Shariati, who died in 1977 two years before the outbreak of the Iranian revolution he helped to inspire: “As you circumambulate and move closer to the Ka‘ba you feel like a small stream merging with a big river. You have been transformed into a particle that is gradually melting and disappearing. This is love at its absolute peak.”
The skeptically-minded will find some significant gaps in the show’s presentation of its subject. For example the caption for the mahmal footage is somewhat reticent, pointing out only that the practice of sending the embroidered palanquin from Egypt was discontinued in 1926. No mention is made of the trouble that erupted between the Egyptian pilgrims and the Saudi Wahhabis who had recently taken over the holy city. Leadership of the Hajj and protecting the pilgrims from marauding beduin were the foremost prerequisites of Islamic legitimacy and were reflected in contests over Mecca, the ritual centre of the Islamic world. In 930, for instance, ultra-radicals of the Carmathian sect wrenched the sacred Black Stone from the south-eastern corner of the Ka‘ba and took it back to their stronghold on the Gulf near modern Bahrain. It was only returned – in pieces – more than two decades later, after the Abbasid caliph had paid a massive ransom. Given its historic and ritual significance, it would have been useful to have had a display showing the stone’s interesting but mysterious provenance. The captions relate only the Muslim belief that the stone, said to have been brought by the Angel Gabriel, was originally white, but became blackened by its contact with sinful humanity.
Some observers, including the English travellers Richard Burton who visited Mecca disguised as an Afghan in 1853 and Eldon Rutter who made the pilgrimage in 1926 considered it to be meteorite, others a fragment of rock created by meteorite impact. Such theories point in the direction of an object rendered sacred by reason of its extra-terrestrial origin. Fortunately some of the exhibition’s omissions are filled in the catalog, which contains informative articles by Robert Irwin and Ziaduddin Sardar. (My own contribution to the catalog, over-generously acknowledged, was limited to providing minor editorial suggestions, although I will have the opportunity to discuss some of the anthropological dimensions of the pilgrimage at an event scheduled for March 23).
Irwin’s essay balances the exhibitions wholesomely positive displays by pointing out how the pilgrimage had the disastrous side-effect of spreading cholera during the nineteenth century; while Sardar mentions several recent disasters, including the deaths of more than 1400 pilgrims in a stampede in 1990 and more than 300 when fire swept through a camp in 1997. Sardar also acknowledges the astonishing “improvements” being made to the holy site by its Saudi beneficiaries, which include the Royal Clock Tower, a replica of Big Ben five times the size of the London original. No surprise, perhaps, that this astonishing testimony to the taste of Saudi Arabia’s princes finds no place in the British Museum’s hallowed precincts, though images are freely available on the Internet.

Bibliothèque Nationale de France
A painting from the Maqamat of al-Hariri by Yahya al-Wasiti, Iraq, 1237 C.E.
In part, the exhibition’s unskeptical approach seems also to reflect the fact that it is dedicated to a living religion, not an antique belief system. It lays out Muslim beliefs without exploring the archaeological and anthropological matrices from which they issue. The question this raises is: should a scholarly and secular institution refrain from such exploration in order to accommodate religious sensitivities?
In this regard it may be noted that the lead essay on the early Hajj was commissioned from Hugh Kennedy, a “safe” medieval historian, rather than a scholar of religion such as G. R. Hawting. In line with the views of some western revisionists Hawting suggests that the “idolatry” against which Muhammad inveighed may not have been an actual practice, but a rhetorical trope used in arguments between rival monotheists.
On the other hand, the exhibition’s endorsement of orthodox Muslim beliefs conveys an important public message. Within a week of the exhibition’s opening nine Muslim men including seven British citizens, received prison sentences of 12 to 13 years after pleading guilty to a series of terrorist offences, including plots to place a bomb in the toilets of the London Stock Exchange. Inspired by Anwar al-Awlaki, the US citizen and al-Qaeda leader killed in a drone attack in Yemen last year, the group epitomises the alienation felt by many young Muslims from mainstream British society. An exhibition that celebrates the Islamic faith inside Britain’s foremost institution of culture must serve to counter feelings of exclusion.
Numerous schools with Muslim pupils have signed up for group visits to the show, not to mention coach loads of visitors from cities with substantial Muslim populations. The exhibition, with its blend of history, culture and the art that speaks to faith, and arises out of it, takes the British Museum beyond its traditional remit of preserving the past and puts it at the heart of the public debate about Islam and the place of Muslims in British society. Tactful, non-critical references to the beliefs held by Muslim majorities seems a reasonable price to pay for this bold initiative which MacGregor sees as serving the Museum’s “guiding principle of using objects and the forum of an exhibition to try to understand the complex world in which we live”. Minerva’s owl may fly at dusk but for Islam’s active believers, and the petrodollar Guardians of the Holy Places, this is still mid-afternoon.
Hajj is on view at the British Museum through April 15.
nyrb.com

29.2.2012

“… It greatly confuses the issue to assume … that social status is determined solely by income. Economically, no doubt, there are only two classes, the rich and the poor, but socially there is a whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions learned by each class in childhood are not only very different but – and this is the essential point – generally persist from birth to death. Hence the anomalous individuals that you find in every class of society. … you find petty shopkeepers whose income is far lower than that of the bricklayer and who, nevertheless, consider themselves (and are considered) the bricklayer’s social superiors; you find boarding-school boys running Indian provinces and public school men touting vacuum cleaners. If social stratification corresponded precisely to economic stratification, the public-school man would assume a cockney accent the day his income dropped below £200 a year. But does he? On the contrary, he immediately becomes twenty times more Public School than before. He clings to the Old School Tie as to a life-line. And even the (“H”-less) millionaire, though sometimes he goes to an elocutionist and learns a B.B.C accent, seldom succeeds in disguising himself as completely as he would like to. It is in fact very difficult to escape from the class into which you have been born [emphasis added].
As prosperity declines, social anomalies grow commoner. You don’t get more (“H”-less) millionaires, but you do get more and more public-school men touting vacuum cleaners and more and more small shopkeepers driven into the workhouse. Large sections of the middle class are being gradually proletarianised; but the important point is that they do not, at any rate in the first generation, adopt the proletarian outlook. Here am I, for instance, with a bourgeois upbringing and a working-class income. Which class do I belong to? Economically, I belong to the working class, but it is almost impossible for me to think of myself as anything but a member of the bourgeoisie. And supposing I had to take sides, whom should I side with: the upper class which is trying to squeeze me out of existence, or the working class whose manners are not my manners? It is probable that I personally would side with the working class. But what about the tens or hundreds of thousands of others who are in approximately the same position? And what about that far larger class, running into millions this time – the office-workers and the black-coated employees of all kinds – whose traditions are less definitely middle class but who certainly would not thank you if you called them proletarians? All of these people have the same interests and the same enemies as the working class. All are being robbed and bullied by the same system. Yet how many of them realise it? When the pinch came nearly all of them would side with their oppressors and against those who ought to be their allies. It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready made Fascist Party.”
The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell 1937