A human rights sceptic

On the radio this morning, there was some debate over whether Dominic Raab was a human rights sceptic. Everyone was very clear that to be one was a very bad thing, though they couldn't agree on whether he was (he said he wasn't). I think it's a bad thing too, but quite the reverse reason to everyone there: we shouldn't be sceptical about human rights, we should reject them - they are obviously nonsense.

This causes some controversy when I say this at parties (what fun I must be at parties, you imagine), but this is because people don't think properly. It is not that I think the things enshrined in human rights acts are bad things. Most of them are very good: I am glad we have them. However, they can in no meaningful sense be described as rights that apply to all humanity and are instead simply a set of legal principles for part of the world. Rights have to be enforced for the people to whom they apply. And it is obvious that we don't enforce those rights for all humanity. We wouldn't consider it appropriate to go to war to advance even one of them for anyone. So, far from supporting the full (61 pages) of 'human rights' under debate here, in fact we don't support any - and I'm not sure we should. We may have policy objectives to make the world better (though most people in Britain don't care), but we don't believe these rights are universal, or as we could say, human.

I'm also pretty sure that most people don't actually agree with the rights themselves. Certainly globally and nationally, there is no support for the abolition of the death penalty (Protocol 6, Article 1). I disagree, I'm broadly in favour of the rights themselves, with a few quibbles. I'm also in favour of the ECHR, I just wish it wasn't called that, because it's not. It's a court all right, but it's not administering human rights, rather some core (western) European principles of justice. Long may it continue to do so.

The two swords

As I am sure all of you will know, it was one of the early popes (Gelasius I) that formulated the theory of two (metaphorical) swords. One of temporal power, wielded by the Emperor; the other of spiritual power, wielded by the bishop of Rome. The popes were, of course, emphatic that the spiritual power could direct the temporal. This went down less well in imperial circles, sometimes with disastrous results. Now, this is obviously relevant in a lot of ways, but it came to mind when the teacup-like storm broke over council prayers and the associated debate: it very much  feels to me that we're having a debate about the wrong sword.

On the face of it, this should be easy: after all, it has prayers in it, it must be a religious issue. Perhaps not - one could argue that public statements at a state occasion, sanctioned by the state church and with hundreds of years of state-sponsored tradition behind them might just be temporal. But neither of these is right - this is about tradition, and it's about politics. Personally, I find prayer boring. If I were at a council, I suspect I'd prefer it if we didn't have them, because then we could get the meeting over with quicker. However, we're not debating my convenience (would that we could make all decisions on that basis), but whether we should change a long standing tradition. And I don't think we should, because I'm a big Tory: I believe that, by and large, things that don't do major harm should be left alone; and that 'because we've done this for a long time' is a perfectly reasonable justification for something.

Aha, the opposition will cry - that won't do, for this is discrimination. Toss, I would answer, because this is fake outrage, shown by the fact that quite a lot of things are discriminatory. Elections for example are inherently discriminatory against the unpopular (as, sadly, I found out to my cost). This whole complaint about removing all discriminatory elements really frames it in a way I disagree with - twice. Firstly, on significance. This is not a major issue. I find it extraordinary that occasionally having to say something you disagree with is something we now feel is a barrier to people's participation. I do this all the time. And I think we'd all be a lot better if we worried about important things: if you think the church has too big a role in the state, spend your time arguing for disestablishment, this just doesn't matter. Secondly, and most seriously, I wonder if the opponents of formal prayer imagine that their position is value free. Because it isn't. Stupid people (yes, Baroness Warsi, I mean you) have been talking about militant secularism. That is nonsense. But it's disingenuous to suggest that the modern liberal secular position is the absence of the imposition of values. In reality, it's full of values, pretty much all of which I share. But they are not axiomatic or the product of inexorable logic. There's nothing self-evident about individual 'rights' or about freedom of speech. Nor are they not discriminatory: as currently stated, they penalise - for example - the polygamist. They are also  certainly not consistent: ask a believer in democracy what to do about the death penalty. I am not claiming one needs to be religious to have the right answers here, merely that this is an agenda, and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

Inevitably therefore it clashes with other agendas, in this case the Church of England. I'd like everyone to stop polluting this dialogue with 'religious'. I share much more with western liberal atheists than with the Buddhists; I suspect I have more in common with the Caliphate of Cordoba than modern Iran (historical out of period alert here). Modern western secularists have more in common with the Church of England than with Pol Pot, so I venture that the specific cause espoused is important in definition. This argument is about the Church of England, not 'religion'.

And this makes me even more sure it's a question for the temporal authority. It is not important - I certainly doubt God is concerned about whether he appears on the order paper of the council meeting - but it is change for no benefit. The people involved do not want it; those opposing it do not actually suffer. And if we wish to remake everything as without differentiation and without value judgements, we will inevitably fail. I don't care about prayers at the start of council meetings, but I don't see why we need to go around changing things all the time.

Anathema.

NB. My friend Marcus argues in roughly the same way though with slightly different historical references, and with considerably fewer words.

Bibliography, January 2012

Read: 11

BOTM: A. Burgess, Earthly Powers*

A. Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

A. Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four
A. Conan Doyle, The memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
A. Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear
A. Conan Doyle, The Return of Sherlock Holmes

G. Greene, Monsignor Quixote*

S. Larsson, The girl with the Dragon Tattoo

D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse
A. Trollope, La Vendee (K)

P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves


It wasn't really a contest. I'd forgotten just how good Earthy Powers is. I wonder if I think it is better now as I'm not sure I got all the jokes before - it does reward having read a lot. But actually, I think I'd just forgotten. It is, admittedly, like they'd designed a book for me, full of church and literary history, what one reviewer called 'omnilingual' puns and a great story. He does religion and the church particularly well in it, in a way that most writers don't do, but which is actually closer to how it is done in reality. I can't really comment similarly on how well he does the homosexuality. Regardless, much of the writing is simply brilliant. The opening few hundred pages in particular are whip-crackingly smart, and the bar is kept very high throughout. It's famous for its opening line (which is good), but deserves to be famous for more than that. A masterpiece, though -  unlike last time I read it - I'm not going to be tricked into reading too much more of Burgess' output, which generally hasn't held up, though the Enderby novels are worth it - and not just because of the quadruple onion incident, in which everyone should find pleasure.

Note also a methodological change. I've bought a few ecclesiastical history books for the doctorate. I'm not going to list these any more. So, if it's about the fourth and fifth century eastern church (as A.Schor, Theodoret's people), even if I own it, then I won't be including it - you'll have to wait for the PhD bibliography, which I am sure many of you are. (Schor was very good though)

Demagoguery

I was going to write this about Stephen Hester. Actually, there's not much to say because literally everyone on left and right I have spoken to thinks we should pay the bonus to get / keep the right man. £2m is a lot of money, but it's broadly lower than comparable CEO pay. The average pay of the CEOs of the top ten of the FTSE 100 is about £3.5m. RBS isn't one of the top ten (it's lower down) but the size and complexity of the task I think makes them the right comparator. In banking we know rewards are high (the head of HSBC had £5m for 2010). Given that, if you want someone to do the work, they you pay them the rate. You may not like it and wish they would do it for the public good, but they won't - they're bankers. Not spending the money is stupid and wasteful and the £900m share price fall is the obvious consequence (outlined well here). This is posturing with a hefty price.

There have been a few red herrings in the debate. Firstly, there's been a bit of bleating about the share price performance (i.e. Mr Hester has presided over a fall in value). But we know explicit share price links are dubious because it is so hugely affected by environmental factors (i.e. everyone gets a fortune in a boom), so why are we revisiting this now? Secondly, it's been compared to the public sector settlements. Again, this is nonsense. RBS is not a public service, we happen to own it because of a crisis. We don't want to own banks, we want to sell it. We really don't want civil servant to run; we need it to act like a (successful)  company and make some money. If this is the best counter-argument to the bonus, I despair; even more so now it seems to have worked.

There is, by the way, a real issue here. But it's hard and complex. And that's the prominence of the financial industry in high reward jobs. Over the weekend, I read Momigliano on the decline of the Roman Empire, where he espoused the now unfashionable view that the conversion of the Empire hastened its downfall, thusly:

The Church attracted the most creative minds ... attracted many men who in the past would have become excellent generals, governors of provinces, advisers to the emperors.

I think Momigliano simplifies about Rome, but the point is valid for financial services today. The vast rewards made in banking must suck the most brilliant minds of the modern world into finance. Forget CEOs, it's thousands of people right across the banking industry who earn vast amounts in a away that no other career can offer. There are good reasons for this in part (very competitive, high stress, high workload etc), and hard realities to unpick, but I'm pretty sure it's not desirable.

It's important to be specific here: I'm not saying our best minds shouldn't make a fortune (though I am open to the argument that high levels of inequality carries social cost), but rather that I would like our best minds not to all be bankers. This is a tough emotional call, because it means those of us who are not bankers have to accept we have been working in less competitive industries, but that's what it means, and that's what we need to unpick. I have no idea how to do that, but I think someone should. That would be a good issue for our political class to address.

What they shouldn't do is strip Sir Fred Goodwin of his K. He has no committed a crime: he simply took (some quite stupid) risks that did not come off. He is also, by all accounts, a horrible man. These are not reasons to take away an honour. Honours are awarded for what you did; they are not conditional on future conduct - criminals sit in the Lords, a thousand misdemeanours have been committed by recipients of honours in every country.  This is spiteful where we should be measured, inconsistent where government should be above such things and simplistic when the issues are complex. And it is shameful. Like the outcry over Stephen Hester's bonus, the incident is a sideshow, but these issues are real. Aristotle warned of the slide into mob rule that accompanies democracy. This will doubtless be popular, but it is demagoguery of the most blatant kind, and those who practise it deserve out contempt.

Bibliography, 2011

My summary of the year in books:

January - H. Lee, To kill a Mockingbird
February - U.Eco, The Name of the Rose*
March - J. Steinbeck, East of Eden*
April - C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary
May - H. Mantel, Wolf Hall 
June- P. Leigh Fermor, Mani*
July - K. Fox, Watching the English
August - T. Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569 - 1999 (K)
September - E. Ladurie, Montaillou
October - S. Graubard, The Presidents
November - M. Bowden, The Best Game ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL
December - A. Agassi, Open

I can't help but notice the first half was a lot better than the second.  The overall stats show much less reading this year. Only 124, and absolutely dominated by fiction - 60%, higher than ever before. Interestingly that doesn't show in the BOTM which is 4:3:5 (fiction : history : other non-fiction). And two of those those fiction were rereads. Which essentially means I've read a lot of low grade fiction. Actually, I'm not sure that's true - part of the problem is Wodehouse, who I started to read this year and possibly overegged it a bit. 14 of my books, over 10% were Wodehouse: all were wonderful, but none could snatch a BOTM. 

Anyway, for the vanishingly small  number of people who care, it's book of the year time.

Fiction was remarkably easy.  I hesitated over East of Eden, because it is the most sustained piece of brilliant writing I read this year, but a) it's a reread, and b) it's not To kill a Mockingbird, which was just better. It's shorter, and I think the talent to make something so evocative and powerful is greater without the grand canvas that Steinbeck uses.  But it's also better, and more important.

Non-fiction was much harder. James, Leigh Fermor and Fox were all excellent. However, the one I found myself repeating in conversation most has been Snyder, The reconstruction of Nations. There's an unfamiliarity bias here, as it's a fascinating topic, even more so as the Euro collapses. The westerner and the medievalist in me needs to be reminded that nationhood is still in flux in most of world, and it requires work. That book did it exceptionally well. It's a challenge to make an essentially unfamiliar topic accessible and interesting without becoming a bit patronising and dull, so additional plaudits for that.

Bibliography, December 2011

Read: 10
BOTM - A. Agassi, Open

A. Leslie, Killing my own snakes
N. Lewis, Naples '44
J. Le Carre, The Spy who came in from the cold
J. Morris, Venice
A. Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
F.Scott Fitzgerald, The great Gatsby*
J. Williamson, Darker than you think
J. Winterson, Oranges are not the only fruit
J. Winterson, Why by happy when you could be normal?


Thanks heaven for Christmas. On the 20th, I'd only read four things, but a very relaxing in-law Christmas took me well beyond that. I spent almost all of the month thinking BOTM of the month would be Cry, the beloved country - it deserves its classic status, and prefigures some of the more famous apartheid literature by a good few decades. But I finished Agassi this morning. Now, this clearly won't be a classic in fifty years: it's a bit hammed up, you really need to know who the people are (Pete Sampras' dullness only gets mentioned a few times, as a reader you need to fill in the blanks a bit), and it's a memoir, so there's a bit of post-rationalisation about the past. But for now, it's a classic. The voice is compelling and engaging (much like the man), and the emotions are no less real for being a bit two dimensional. It's a great book in a genre that all to often fails to deliver them.

A Christian country

I was rather hoping for a bigger explosion from the Prime Minister's Christian country speech. True, there was the odd mad overstatement from some elements, but by and large everyone seems to have shrugged, said 'probably' and moved on. Of course, even the diehard atheist struggles to say convincingly 'we're not Christian at all' on the way to buy some presents for Christmas, before the public holidays for the incarnation and the feast day of the first martyr. And it was for a celebration of the bible, so not entirely a surprise. 

However, I also suspect it's because once they'd read the speech, it was a bit incoherent. Cameron made three points:

• Firstly that the King James bible is one of the monuments of the English language that reverberates through history and literature to the benefit of mankind. As this is obviously true, it is hardly likely to cause a storm of protest. 
• Secondly, that 'biblical,' by which he means 'Christian' thinking has shaped our morals. I'm surprised this hasn't been attacked, but one for later.
• Thirdly, that Britain is a Christian country. Britain isn't a country, England might be, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is. Sadly, no-one cared about that, but they did debate the adjective - badly.

Cameron started it of course, by being vapid. His definition of distinctively Christian characteristics went as follows: 'responsibility, hard work, charity, compassion, humility, self-sacrifice, love, pride in working for the common good and honouring the social obligations we have to one another, to our families and our communities.' I'm not claiming there is anything unchristian about the list, but they don't seem very distinctive. Promoters of social obligation for example might look to that other excellent institution of the early years of the Christian Era, the Roman Empire and their system of civic society. 

But the opposite is wrong too: Christian values are not universal ones dressed up in vestments; there are things that are pretty distinctive to the Christian heritage. There aren't really any specific universal truths across humanity, only platitudes. For example, let's take the individual: Christianity at its core is a individual religion. Christ is uncompromising about that - he comes 'to set a man against his father and a daughter against her mother' (Mt. 10.34). Confucius wants to talk about ancestors (BTW, I discovered while googling for this that the lineal descendant of Confucius is known to the 83rd generation - i.e., now. It's the longest family tree ever); and Buddhism - ever helpful - thinks the self doesn't exist, it's an illusion. This approach becomes fairly critical when one starts debating, say, sexuality or democracy. We could also go outside religion for this, for example, private property: jolly important in the west; made  no sense at all to the native Americans (see Locke).

In the west, there are three big candidates as roots for these values - the Greeks, the Romans, and Christianity (plus the Jews, maybe a half). I'm not sure it's very productive, though quite interesting, to try to identify which caused what. What we have is a amalgam of ancient Graeco-Roman classical civilisation and Christian values, fused together in the fourth century (ish) and cooked up over the following sixteen centuries, with  a smattering of other influences as we go. For most of its life, well into the twentieth century, our heritage has thus been shaped by the church, more or less. It is Christian ideology that has shaped how we think for most of two millennia. It's a great birthright. It's not universal, though it should be (oh yes, another distinctively Christian ideology - ask a Hindu what he thinks of the lands outside India) and we should not pretend it's generated ex nihilo, though if it helps, call it western liberalism, or secularism.

I think we should be calling it Christian and thus we should call the country Christian, because I think we are. I don't think we're very coherent about it; I certainly don't think we're very devout, and there are a lot of things I'd change if I could. But we do look to Christianity to lead on a lot of these things: that's why the country was unimpressed with the conduct of the chapter of St Paul's - they felt their church had failed. We wouldn't have got so bothered about a mosque. Of course a subset of highly educated metropolitan people don't think this, but they're abnormal. And I don't think they realise how abnormal people they (we) are. Here's Dawkins, arguing I think for disestablishment and the abolition of faith schools (slightly oddly, he seems to think we'll be a secular country if we have a separation of church and state - just like America and Turkey). I don't actually mind the abolition of faith schools. What kind of followers of a great God worry about the control of schools in an benign rich society shaped in the image of their faith? However, he doesn't seem to get the cultural point. I mean, he claims to: in that same editorial he says he doesn't want to abolish Christmas and he likes the King James bible, but it all seems a bit tactical. Then he says the correct analogy for Christianity is whether anyone would call a child a monetarist just as they do a Catholic. But the thing it,  it just isn't. One is an intellectual proposition (how do changes in the money supply work?); the other is cultural, and people think about culture without taking a razor to the logic. I suspect he might know this. He doesn't mention nationalism in his list of things that cause problems, because it also takes his argument away. People don't think logically about the country they belong to, they just do: there are English children, there are even British children. People care about their countrymen and their heritage not because they've looked at it logically, but because of the cultural heritage they take from their parents and society. And then they look to certain exemplars to represent it. This means much of the country cares about men kicking or throwing balls around. I'm pretty certain they think very similar things about morality and the church  in England.  

And that, to my mind, makes the UK is a Christian country. The church is looked to for morals by the overwhelming majority of people, even if they don't go or even say they are Christian. It's still the lodestone for that kind of thing. It may not be in the future. The UK may not be a Christian country forever. I very much hope it will be; I'd like it to be more of one now. However, it will always (used in a poetic not logical sense) be one of Christian descent. And every western atheist should applaud that.

A joyous incarnationtide to one and all.