Confessing Evangelical

Is it free speech to shout "Nonsense!" in a crowded conference centre?

An 82-year old man named Walter Wolfgang - a "veteran Labour activist" who came to this country as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany - found out the government's answer to that question yesterday, when he was manhandled out of the Labour party conference for heckling the foreign secretary, Jack Straw (video footage available here).

Mr Wolfgang was then refused readmittance to the venue under - get this - the Terrorism Act.

Once they realised what a PR debacle this had turned into, the Labour party eventually issued a rather limp apology and said Mr Wolfgang could come in today, provided he promises to behave himself.

The irony levels hit even more dangerous heights when we consider what it was that prompted Mr Wolfgang to engage in his terrorist-style disruption: namely, Jack Straw's assertion that:

"We are in Iraq for one reason only - to help the elected Iraqi government build a secure, democratic and stable nation".

And what a fine example we are setting them, too.

As the Guardian's sketchwriter, Simon Hoggart, points out, this is not an isolated incident. Delegates have been prohibited from taking sweets (i.e. "candy") into the conference hall, because "they could be used as missiles". As Hoggart points out:

The issue may be tiny, but it is a reflection of the state of the Labour party now, combining bombast, vainglory and total paranoia.

And these are the people to whom we are currently entrusting our liberties as they plan new anti-terrorist laws, such as the proposal to make it a criminal offence (punishable by up to five years in prison) to "glorify, exalt or celebrate" terrorism.

As Matthew Parris pointed out in the article I linked in my previous post on this subject, the only way these laws could be made remotely palatable is if they were enforced with a degree of "goodwill and common sense".

Yesterday's events - the use of existing anti-terrorism measures to stop an 82-year old embarrassing the foreign secretary, deadly Mint Imperials confiscated as dangerous weapons - show how much "goodwill and common sense" we can expect once the new laws are in force.

Update: Mr Wolfgang "received a hero's welcome" on his return to the conference this morning. Tony Blair has also apologised.

You are a Social Liberal (65% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (13% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist

So there you go. By US standards at least, I'm a socialist. Mind you, according to Andrew Sullivan, George W Bush is a socialist by US standards...

This result is, however, consistent with my most recent results on the UK-based Political Compass, which I took again a couple of weeks ago. Compare this with my previous results from a year earlier.

HT: Jason. I'm not linking the actual quiz as the site concerned has some very dubious content (though on the plus side, I now know where to go if I want to find someone with whom to have a casual fling in Bexley, which is where the banner ads seemed to think I live).

One thing I found interesting was the division of the political map in the top graphic. Would any US readers care to comment on the accuracy of that? The one comment I have myself is that the survey's use of the term "economic liberal" is rather confusing, since normally I'd take that to mean "neoliberal" in the Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher sense.

If the sample precis of the Sermon on the Mount is anything to go by, the only offensive thing about the 100 Minute Bible is that it turns Scripture into dull journalese.

The Guardian's John Crace does much better, with a version of his regular "digested read" feature, which provides a tongue-in-cheek digest of a recent book, followed by "the digested, digested" (a one sentence summary for the very busy reader).

Crace's summary of the Bible's message reads as follows:

God created heaven and earth in six days. He then made Adam, quickly followed by Eve when he saw that Adam was bored. Their descendants proved a real disappointment, so he flooded the world and started again.

But God continued to have a lot of problems. Abraham was OK, but Jacob cheated on his brother and Joseph was such a prima donna that his brothers sold him into slavery. Moses tried to lay down the law but it took an almighty strop for anyone to notice. Joshua killed a lot of people; so did Gideon; in fact most of the judges and kings were lying psychopaths. Understandably the Jewish people needed to relax, so they sang psalms to the tune of Kumbaya.

Back in the action and it was still looking grim. A few grumpy prophets apart, it was bloodletting on a grand scale all the way. Things improved when an angel got Mary pregnant in 1BC. Joseph was very understanding about this and nine months later Jesus was born. Various shepherds and wise men paid their respects before Jesus was whisked out of town to escape Herod. He spent the next 30 years chilling out before beginning his ministry when John the Baptist was arrested. Jesus tried to avoid publicity but it was hard to keep a low profile when he was pulling off stunts like raising the dead. So it wasn't long before he collected some disciples, and from these he chose his main crew, the apostles.

Much of Jesus's teaching was captured when he spoke about the meaning of humility during the Sermon on the Mount. Apart from forgiving sins, he also said that anyone who divorces and remarries commits adultery. These views made him extremely unpopular, but calling himself the Messiah was the last straw. When he rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday he knew his days were numbered. On the Thursday night he was betrayed by Judas and taken before Pontius Pilate, who offered the Jews a chance to reprieve him. They refused and he was crucified and buried.

He rose from the dead on Easter Sunday. Jesus reassured his followers he was for real and over the next 40 days he made a number of other appearances before going up to heaven.

Digested, digested: Then I saw his face ... Now I'm a Believer.

On to happier things... we went to an enjoyable concert last night at St Paul's Cathedral - John Rutter's Requiem, conducted by the composer himself as part of a special concert to mark his 60th birthday.

The Requiem was preceded by Brahms's Academic Festival Overture followed by one of my favourite pieces of music, John Tavener's work for cello and orchestra, The Protecting Veil. (Tavener and Rutter were at school together.)

The Protecting Veil is inspired by the Orthodox Church's Feast of the Protecting Veil of the Mother of God, which was instituted to commemorate the vision of Andrew, the holy fool, during an all-night vigil when Constantinople was under Saracen attack in the early tenth century. As Tavener puts it in his notes to the piece:

[Andrew and his disciple] saw the Mother of God; she was standing high up above them in the air, surrounded by a host of saints. She was praying earnestly and spreading out her Veil ... as a protective shelter over the Christians. Heartened by this vision, the Greeks withstood the Saracen assault and drove away the Saracen army.

Tavener explains that his piece seeks "to capture some of the almost cosmic power of the Mother of God". The solo cello represents the Mother of God, and the work is "an attempt to make a lyrical ikon in sound, rather than in wood, and using the music of the cellist to paint rather than a brush."

A gorgeous piece of music. Rumours that its composition was funded by Eastern Orthodox missionary societies are, I'm sure, exaggerated...

As for Rutter's Requiem, this was another treat, and again the Amazon samples are worth listening to if you're unfamiliar with the piece.

One of my favourite aspects of this work is the way Rutter combines the Latin Requiem Mass with the Burial Service from the Book of Common Prayer. It brings out the contrast between the imploring tone of the Requiem (whose opening words are "Grant to them eternal rest, O Lord") and the message of hope and assurance of Cranmer's service (which opens, by contrast, with the words, "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die").

If there's any place for the former (and, to a limited extent, I think there is, as did Luther), then that's only in the context of the latter.

This combination is used to great effect in the final movement, Lux Aeterna, as well as in the Agnus Dei:

Agnus Dei, qui tollis pecatta mundi:
dona eis requiem.

Man that us born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.
He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower;
he fleeth as it were a shadow.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi:
dona eis requiem.

In the midst of life, we are in death:
of whom may we seek for succour?

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi.
dona eis requiem.

I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord:
he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:
and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

Almost the last remaining thread keeping me attached to the pro-war camp is what you might call "the Hitchens defence": that to pull out of Iraq now would leave ordinary Iraqis - particularly women, the anti-Islamist opposition and (as Christopher Hitchens himself never mentions) Christians - at the mercy of terrorists and theocratic fundamentalists, just as not to have gone in would have left them at the mercy of Saddam Hussein in what Hitchens describes as "a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave underneath it".

Well, Simon Jenkins' article from Wednesday's Guardian has gone some way to breaking even that last thread. "To say we must stay in Iraq to save it from chaos is a lie", writes Jenkins, who argues that "this is a fiasco without parallel in recent British history":

Don't be fooled a second time. They told you Britain must invade Iraq because of its weapons of mass destruction. They were wrong. Now they say British troops must stay in Iraq because otherwise it will collapse into chaos.

Politicians on all sides (even those who opposed the war in the first place) are agreed on "this second lie":

Its axiom is that western soldiers are so competent that, wherever they go, only good can result. It is their duty not to leave Iraq until order is established, infrastructure rebuilt and democracy entrenched.

But as Simon Jenkins points out, that little word "until" is precisely the problem:

It hides a bloodstained half century of western self-delusion and arrogance. The white man's burden is still alive and well in the skies over Baghdad (the streets are now too dangerous).

Soldiers and civilians may die by the hundred. Money may be squandered by the million. But Tony Blair tells us that only western values enforced by the barrel of a gun can save the hapless Mussulman from his own worst enemy, himself.

The original policy envisaged (and required) "momentum towards local sovereignty and early withdrawal", but instead we have seen a "civil collapse" in which "we do not even know on which side are the Basra police". Jenkins continues:

Iraqis of my acquaintance are numb at the violence unleashed by the west's failure to impose order on their country. ... They are past caring whether it was better or worse under Saddam. They know only that more people a month are being killed than at any time since the massacres of the early 1990s. If death and destruction are any guide, Britain's pre-invasion policy of containment was far more successful than occupation.

Jenkins can see little positive being accomplished by the occupation:

Infrastructure is not being restored. Baghdad's water, electricity and sewers are in worse shape than a decade ago. Huge sums - such as the alleged $1bn for military supplies - are being stolen and stashed in Jordanian banks. The new constitution is a dead letter except the clauses that are blatantly sharia. These are already being enforced de facto in Shia areas.

As for the argument that withdrawing would lead to "revenge attacks, ethnic cleansing and even partition", Jenkins points out that "these are all happening anyway". He concludes:

America left Vietnam and Lebanon to their fate. They survived. We left Aden and other colonies. Some, such as Malaya and Cyprus, saw bloodshed and partition. We said rightly that this was their business. So too is Iraq for the Iraqis. We have made enough mess there already.

Jenkins opposed the war from the start. So it's scarcely surprising that he thinks we should cut our losses. However, I think he is certainly spot on with his comments about the "white man's burden", and the arrogant western assumption that we are able to make things better by being (and staying) there. It's one thing to say, "you break it, you fix it", but you don't normally entrust crucial repairs to the person whose incompetence or stupidity caused the damage in the first place.

I then turned to Boris Johnson's column in yesterday's Telegraph. Johnson originally supported the war, but he recanted some time ago, and now writes:

What a shambles. What chaos. And how quickly it all seems to be getting worse.

Johnson describes how the two "undercover soldiers" sprung from a Baghdad prison by the British army earlier this week had refused to produce their documents at a checkpoint, "because they knew that the Iraqi police force in Basra is now completely riddled with extremist Shia elements", and continues:

Consider the symbolic importance of that. We have spent 30 months working with the local Iraqi police in Basra. Hundreds of millions of British taxpayers' money have gone on the rebuilding of the institutions of civic society, of which the police are the key component. We have coached them, drilled them, exhorted them and recruited them. Swarms of MPs and journalists have been flown out to admire the change we are wreaking.

And what is the net result? It is not that the Basra police suffer from the odd bad apple; no, it's like the denouement of a nightmare Hollywood cop movie, in which you discover that virtually the entire force has been corrupted.

As Johnson concludes:

Whatever we achieve in Iraq, we will not have made our own world safer, or made the risk of terrorism less likely: quite the reverse.

Perhaps it is just my paranoia, but there was something too neat about the way the British authorities released the new pictures of the four suicide bombers this week, not just to take the heat out of the Basra story, but also subliminally to remind the public of the claim with which Blair invaded Iraq - that it was part of the "war on terror".

That claim was a lie, and whatever good may come out of the Iraq war, we should never forget that it was based on that lie.

Finally, the Blood and Treasure blog points to apparent links between the "arrest" of the two British soldiers earlier this week and recent bombing attacks on British servicemen:

Assuming that this is correct, it follows that these attacks were undertaken with at least the tacit support of the Basra government, itself elected under the supervision of British occupation forces. In short, the government we installed is telling us that it’s time to leave.

All this calls to mind the suggestion made by someone during the Vietnam War, that the US should "say we won and go home". I suspect we've reached the stage where that is the best we can hope to achieve in Iraq. And, to adopt a phrase from Michael Ledeen that Mark Steyn is fond of quoting (though for the opposite purpose): "Faster, please".

Update: Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell depicted the "say we won and go home" approach well over a year ago. Don't think he thought too much of it, though...

I retook the Who Should You Vote For? test that was doing the rounds at the last general election, and came up with the following result:

Labour -18
Conservative -1
	Liberal Democrat 43
	UKIP 16
	Green 69

A result to gladden the heart of DS Ketelby. However, I should point out that back in May the same test said I should vote for UKIP, and I didn't take any notice of it back then, either.

I also took the same site's "electoral reform quiz". Now this result I do agree with. We definitely need to move to an electoral system that gets away from the "winner takes all" approach of "first past the post", which results in elections being decided by 200,000 floating voters in a handful of marginal constituencies, but equally we need to keep a close local connection between voters and MPs (not least so that the system meets Tony Benn's test of "How do we get rid of you?") rather than handing yet more power to central party machines. Single Transferable Vote (STV) seems to get closest to those requirements:

	FPPTP 6
AMS -4
	STV 19
JAV+ -11
	PLS 13
	CC 6

Key: FPPTP = First Past the Post; AMS = Additional Member System; STV = Single Transferable Vote; JAV+ = Jenkins Alternate Vote Plus; PLS = Party List System; CC = Cellular Constituencies. For explanations of these systems, please read the electoral reform FAQ. For more information about electoral reform in general, visit the Electoral Reform Society or Make My Vote Count.

...or so says the slogan on the side of our elder son's toy recycling lorry.

I've never had anything against recycling - approving of the "waste not, want not" frugality of it - but have sometimes been a bit sceptical of its supposed benefits. An article in today's Guardian, asking "Should I ... bother recycling?", sums up these doubts as follows:

What of the oft-heard claims that it can take more energy to sort, collect and recycle something than it does to produce it in the first place?

And what of the cynical belief that what we send to be recycled is just tipped, out of view, on to landfill anyway?

I'm not here to start preaching at those who disagree with the value of recycling. However, if like me you are vaguely in favour of recycling but want to know whether it's worth all the trouble that (ahem) my wife goes to, that article is well worth a read.

The writer assures us that our recycled rubbish is duly sorted and processed, and provides figures demonstrating the energy benefits of recycling:

[T]he energy used to recycle plastic bottles is eight times less than required to manufacture the same virgin polymer. Producing recycled paper uses up to 70% less energy than virgin paper, as well as using far less water. And recycling just one glass bottle saves enough energy to power a TV for 20 minutes.

However, the article concludes that waste reduction and reuse of material is better still, thus triumphantly vindicating the message being subliminally imprinted on our children by the Tonka recycling lorry. (We'll pass over the fact that the said lorry was actually made in China out of fresh, virgin plastic...)

Following on from my previous post on proposed anti-terror legislation, Alan Bennett's 2004 play The History Boys opens with a cabinet minister explaining a new piece of legislation in terms that are eerily familiar to anyone who has heard the government's arguments in favour of its various liberty-trimming proposals over the years:

"Our strategy should ... be to insist that the bill does not diminish the liberty of the subject but amplifies it; that the true liberty of the subject consists in the freedom to walk the streets unmolested etc., etc., secure in the knowledge that if a crime is committed it will be promptly and sufficiently punished, and that far from circumscribing the liberty of the subject this will enlarge it.

"I would not try to be shrill or earnest. An amused tolerance always comes over best, particularly on television. Paradox works well and mists up the windows, which is handy. 'The loss of liberty is the price we pay for freedom,' type thing."

But one of the most effective warnings of where all this can lead comes from over 200 years ago, in 1798, when the London Corresponding Society published an "Address to the Irish Nation" in response to the brutal subjugation of Ireland taking place at that time:

GENEROUS, GALLANT NATION
May the present Address convince you how truly we sympathise in all your Sufferings ... May Nations ... learn that "existing circumstances" have been the Watchword of Despotism in all Ages and in all Countries; and that when a People once permits Government to violate the genuine Principles of Liberty, Encroachment will be grafted upon Encroachment; Evil will grow upon Evil; Violation will follow Violation, and Power will engender Power, till the Liberties of ALL will be held at despotic command...

(EP Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p.171)

Four Church of England bishops have called for a meeting between Christian and Muslim leaders which would provide a "public act of institutional repentance" for the "gravely mistaken" invasion of Iraq.

Quite apart from the stupidity of appearing to confirm the perception that this was a "Christian" war against Muslims, it's clear the bishops haven't read CS Lewis's essay on "The Dangers of National Repentance", in particular Lewis' comments on the seductive thrill of confessing other people's sins rather than one's own:

England is not a natural agent, but a civil society. When we speak of England's actions we mean the actions of the British Government. The young man who is called upon to repent of England's foreign policy is really being called upon to repent the acts of his neighbour; for a Foreign Secretary or a Cabinet Minister is certainly a neighbour. And repentance presupposes condemnation.

The first and fatal charm of national repentance is, therefore, the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing - but, first, of denouncing - the conduct of others.

Lewis continues by observing that this form of "institutional repentance" allows you to "indulge in the popular vice of detraction without restraint, and yet feel all the time that you are practising contrition":

A group of such young penitents will say, "Let us repent our national sins"; what they mean is, "Let us attribute to our neighbour (even our Christian neighbour) in the Cabinet, whenever we disagree with him, every abominable motive that Satan can suggest to our fancy."

Of course, what has changed since Lewis' day is that he was writing about young, immature Christians ("last-year undergraduates and first-year curates"), whereas now this sort of proposal comes from the House of Bishops.

A wonderful article by Matthew Parris on the government's proposed anti-terror laws, in particular the new crime of "glorifying, exalting or celebrating" terrorism.

Parris doesn't like this proposal at all, and he knows exactly where the blame lies:

It won’t have been Mr Clarke’s idea to put people in prison for praising an idea. Home Office lawyers will have told him that it cannot be done and (one hopes) his instincts will anyway have been against the attempt.

No, there is only one possible source of this folly. The notion that you can make the world a better place by making it illegal to say nasty and dangerous things has the intellectual sloppiness, the headline-seeking shallowness, the philosophical carelessness and the creepy mix of the sinister with the sanctimonious, that marks it out as absolutely characteristic of our Prime Minister’s mind.

As Parris goes on to point out, some of the details of this proposal are utterly bizarre:

[T]he proposed law will include powers for government to "certify" past terrorist movements who may, or may not, be "glorified".

What madness is this? Are ministers and civil servants to work through history books, ticking boxes? Are we to have (retrospectively) approved terrorists? Truly, as Paul Flynn MP has said, under new Labour "only the future is certain; the past is always changing".

The main practical objection to this proposal is that it will be unworkable:

Were Mr Blair’s idea to become law, only minutes would elapse before George Galloway tested that law by glorifying terrorism in Commons debate. If parliamentary privilege were to cover such speeches, Mr Galloway would repeat his on the streets of Bow. The effect would be wholly counter-productive...

Some legal nets have to be bigger than their intended catch, and goodwill and common sense may remedy the imprecision. But here goodwill will be absent. People will be actively seeking prosecutions. This law will never work.

But Parris (observing that "the easy way to resist it was on practical grounds like these") also puts forward a principled argument against the proposals:

So now for the hard way. I object to creating speech-crimes even if the legislation could be tightly drafted and made to work. I object to the banning of ideas, theories or arguments. I object to the prohibition of sentiments. Difficult as the boundary is to mark or police, I see the line between thought and action as absolutely central to the rule of law in a liberal society.

Good law ties hands; it does not stop mouths or minds. It is for what we do, not what we think or say, that we should expect the policeman’s knock ... The Prime Minister’s disregard for this most important of distinctions is deeply troubling.

Parris argues that we should retain the current situation in which "a man or woman is free to say they admire a terrorist and support his aims, but not to offer any practical support to him in his work":

The difference is fuzzy and we are doomed to agonies of indecision about the marshy ground which lies between taking stands and taking part, but how we negotiate that marsh, and whether we think it matters, is what marks us out as caring about individual liberty.

Not that this is likely to stop the Prime Minister. For as Parris concludes:

I don’t think Tony Blair cares. I doubt he even recognises the problem. For this he should not be forgiven, and never be trusted. Charles Clarke, who knows better, should feel ashamed to have anything to do with this measure.

As the parent of two lively (but lovely) boys - see our holiday photos, just posted on my Flickr account (though taken by my wife, who is the talented one round here), for visual confirmation of that statement - I found Chris Atwood's thoughts on child-rearing tremendously encouraging:

I've seen a lot of Reformed types (used in the real sense, Presbyterians, particular Baptists, etc.) push a model of parenting that stresses punishment according to strict rules without display of anger.

But that's not how I see God disciplining His people in Scripture. There, He's pretty lax for a while, lets His people take a mile when given an inch, until suddenly He blows up and gets really furious. But when the kids repent, He's all over them in hugs and kisses. I'm Biblical enough to believe this model of child-rearing rather than "every punishment exactly proportionate to the offense" type. And I think it works better.

While there would certainly be dangers in setting this up as a general principle of parenting - if detached from Chris's emphasis on following God's example, or in the hands of the wrong sort of parent, then it could easily turn into a caprice bordering on emotional abuse - I certainly find it preferable to the approach advocated by John Wesley (warning: persons of a sensitive disposition, or who have any admiration for John Wesley, should look away now):

Break their wills betimes; begin this great work before they can run alone, before they can speak plain, or perhaps speak at all. Whatever pains it cost, conquer their stubbornness: break the will, if you would not damn the child. I conjure you not to neglect, not to delay this!

Therefore, (1.) Let a child, from a year old, be taught to fear the rod and to cry softly. In order to this, (2.) Let him have nothing he cries for; absolutely nothing, great or small; else you undo your own work. (3.) At all events, from that age, make him do as he is bid, if you whip him ten times running to effect it. Let none persuade you it is cruelty to do this; it is cruelty not to do it. Break his will now, and his soul will live, and he will probably bless you to all eternity.

Mercifully, I've not come across any modern Christians promoting anything quite so horrific as this, but I certainly have come across the "Reformed types" to which Chris refers. One reason why I found Chris's words so helpful is that they helped dispel some of the lingering after effects of having read too many books and articles on "covenant faithfulness" in parenting during my Reformed days.

The message of books like Doug Wilson's Standing on the Promises seems to boil down to: "Do this and they shall live". In other words, follow the rules and your child's salvation is assured, and if your child backslides then it's all your fault. Erm, is that right, Doug? Whatever.

I remember reading one article in which a respected Reformed pastor recommended that churches should have a separate room set aside for young children: not as a creche, but as a place to which parents could take their children to give them a good spanking if they fail to keep quiet and still during the service. (I wonder if it would be soundproofed? Or perhaps you could just have Ode to Joy playing on a continuous loop at high volume to drown out the screams. And the newspaper headlines kind of write themselves, don't they?)

No doubt Wesley would regard this as the worst sort of milk-and-water child-coddling (just a "spanking"?), but that was a bit much even for a "pro-smacker" like myself.

Terry Eagleton's essay, The Roots of Terror (see previous post) also has some interesting observations on "absolute freedom", libertarianism, and the "revolutionary" nature of our society.

Prof Eagleton observes that "most states come into being by invasion, occupation, usurpation, revolution and so on", and that "the coming of law and order was neither lawful nor orderly". The French Revolution caused anger among other European states partly because it made "painfully visible" the truth that "without past terror, [there is] no present society".

Eagleton argues that:

Middle-class capitalist societies are particularly shame-faced about the violence that founded them. This is because the middle classes, more than any other social formation, are necessarily committed to peace, stability and security. Without such a framework, capitalism cannot operate.

However, this ignores the fact that "capitalist society itself ... is the most revolutionary formation in human history":

It is eternally agitating, transforming, shattering, dissolving and reinventing – and all this as part of everyday life.

We only have to look at how the constant radical changes in society over the past two centuries - consider for a moment how different the west was only 25 years ago, let alone 50, 100 or 150 - to see that "Continuous Revolution" is not solely a Maoist concept.

But what form does this revolutionary dynamic at the root of modern "middle-class capitalist societies" take? Eagleton answers this question with reference to Burke's contemporary, Hegel:

He, too, was a witness of the birth of the new middle-class order in France; and he, too, spotted something terrifying at its heart. The name he gave to this terror was absolute freedom – or, as he scathingly called it, ‘the freedom of the void’.

Bourgeois society dreamed of a freedom so pure and absolute that it could tolerate no boundaries or restrictions. And this, in a creaturely, constricted world, was bound to present itself as a form of terror.

My jaw dropped when I read that. Yes, a Marxist atheist just made the very Christian and biblical point that absolute freedom in a "creaturely, constricted world" leads to terrible and violent consequences. But anyway, let's move on.

The Jacobin Terror was a powerful example of this, in which "eventually it was the revolutionaries themselves who filled the carts trundling their way up to the guillotine", but the violence of absolute freedom "continues to infiltrate the daily life of capitalist societies":

Absolute freedom eats itself up ... Absolute freedom means negative freedom: a freedom from all restraint, which can see limits only as barriers to humanity, not as constitutive of it. The world is imperilled not by hard-nosed cynics who insist that nothing is possible, but by wide-eyed, ‘can-do’ idealists for whom anything is possible.

We'll pass over the pointless anti-American jibe that follows those words, and move on to Eagleton's description of how this destructive, libertarian impulse manifests itself from time to time:

Most of the time, this ravaging beast called absolute freedom is kept safely caged. It is hemmed in by laws, procedures, obligations, regulations, the rights of others.

Yet the dream of being the only individual in the world (for this is what such freedom would finally involve) never quite fades, given the narcissism of the human species. From time to time, then, this madness, which lurks at the very core of conventional middle-class society, breaks out anew. It is like a lunatic who gives the slip to his keeper and goes on the rampage.

This can be seen in the tendency of capitalism and market forces - whatever positive benefits may come from them - to undermine or destroy the very institutions and social structures that counteract their negative effects and make them bearable: family, community, church, etc. (Hence Margaret Thatcher found it much easier to unleash the forces of the free market than to maintain the "Victorian values" she also sought to promote.)

As Prof. Eagleton puts it in another essay on the same site:

You can’t let market forces rip without a lot of social featherbedding, otherwise you risk too much instability and resentment; but it’s exactly that sort of featherbedding that market forces destroy.

Couple of good items on Dissonant Bible.

Eleventh Hour Gospel asks what sort of worker would still be left in the marketplace at the end of the day ("the unfit? the weak? those with an obvious disability? ... or with a criminal record? ... those who look like foreigners?").

And then a quote from Conrad Gempf, in which Gempf describes a biblical principle that is "very simple but very neglected":

"[Y]ou shouldn't focus on those passages in the Bible that contain answers you resonate with. Instead, focus on passages that address situations that resonate with your situation. So it's not, "Are there any biblical characters who received the kind of message I want to hear? but rather, "What does the Bible say to characters who are in a similar situation to my own?"

This is particularly true when we read texts such as the Beatitudes ("Wake up, gang. We are not the meek. We rarely know what it means to hunger and thirst") or those to do with worldly wealth:

For instance, too many rich people name and claim promises like "God will provide". Instead, maybe we should make little religious knick-knack vases with dried flowers in them and "Woe to the rich" embossed in gold letters. Yes, Jesus loves us all dearly, but we're told he disciplines those whom he loves (Prov. 3:12; Heb. 12:6). Where are the t-shirts with the motto "Jesus had stern words for people like me?"

Interesting (if at times a little wayward) article by Terry Eagleton on The Roots of Terror, in which he argues that terrorism has its roots in the formation of modern states, as seen particularly in the French Revolution ("The Jacobin Terror was not a strike by a secretive cabal of fanatics against the state, but a strike by a secretive cabal of fanatics known as the state").

I was particularly interested in Prof Eagleton's comments on the distinction between dominance and hegemony. His article looks at the work of probably the first person to use the word "terrorist" in English, "Britain’s doughtiest opponent of the [French] revolution, Edmund Burke", who "is usually considered by the left as a crusty old Tory, [but] was in fact a liberal Whig".

While Burke condemned the violence of the Jacobin Terror just as he had condemned British violence in America and Ireland, he "was not opposed to a stiff dose of terror as such":

On the contrary, he was honest enough to admit that the law itself is in a sense terroristic, and in his view it needed to be. Only in this way would it intimidate its subjects into a suitable sense of awe ... [T]error, in his view, was not just a sudden violent irruption into an otherwise peaceful situation – there was a dash of terror about law and order itself.

However, Burke's experience of British brutality in Ireland showed that terror was not enough:

[T]his daunting power of the law had to be softened and tempered if it was to be effective. It had to engage the affections of the people, not just their fear.

This brings Prof Eagleton on to "what Antonio Gramsci was later to call hegemony". The difference between "dominance" (based solely on the exercise of brute power) and "hegemony" (in which broader cultural attitudes and structures mean that the dominant group gains, in effect, the "consent" of those over which it rules) can be seen when one contrasts British rule in Ireland with the situation in Britain itself:

[Burke] believed ... that the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in his native country had never succeeded in making the transition from a dominant to a hegemonic class. The Irish small farmers tugged their forelocks to them in public, and then waited until night fell so they could go out and smash up their property.

The British ruling class, Burke considered, had developed practices and customs over centuries that bound the affections of their subjects to them ... In Ireland, however, this had lamentably failed to happen. And if you lack hegemony, then you will be forced to use terroristic coercion instead.

Eagleton continues by describing how Burke "looked at all this in gender terms":

The law was masculine, but hegemony was a way of feminising it, making it sweeter and softer. For coercion to do its work, it must drape itself in the alluring dress of a woman. The law for Burke is a cross-dresser. But there is always an ugly bulge in its decorous garments.

In Burke’s eyes, women are beautiful, while men are sublime. And the most potent form of authority is one that combines the two. Like the stereotypical female seducer, the law must lull us into sweet oblivion of its own sublime terror. Like God, it is terrible to look upon with the naked eye; but if we view it through the veils of hegemony, we can find its edicts more to our taste.

Problems come when these "veils of hegemony" are lost and people are exposed to a naked exercise of power over them:

If the law strips off its seductive drapery and exposes the full extent of its unlovely power – if, so to speak, it becomes a flasher rather than a cross-dresser – we will find it repulsive and revolt against it. Terror breaks out when hegemony breaks down.

This is what had happened to the British in Ireland, India and the American colonies, and it is what happened to the French Revolution as the first rush of revolutionary (and "hegemonic") fervour gave way to the brutal "dominance" of the Terror.

And (lurking within Prof Eagleton's reflex Bush-bashing and anti-Americanism) there is a serious warning to the US that pursuing dominance rather than hegemony (a hegemony the US undoubtedly possesses, not least by means of the entertainment industry, leading much of the world to want to "be like America") could lead to a situation in which "your own brute force brings you toppling to the ground".

That may be putting it a bit too strongly - I suspect Prof Eagleton will have to live with American political, economic and cultural power for a while longer yet ;-) - but it's a reminder that mere "dominance" is never enough for a country to remain what 1066 and All That would call "Top Nation".

In my first post on returning from holiday the other day, I mentioned that my holiday reading had included Robert de Board's Counselling for Toads, in which Mr Toad from Wind in the Willows undergoes counselling after his friends Rat, Mole and Badger find him in a very depressed state and are "worried that he might do something silly".

While the book is mainly concerned with Toad, de Board's psychological acuity and insight into Kenneth Grahame's characters shows up from the very first page, with his description of Mole's frustrations with Rat:

He felt that he was rarely able to be himself because he was always standing in Rat's shadow. If they went boating, Rat would usually tell him that he was not doing it right, like not feathering his oars properly. When they moored, Rat would check the painter to see that Mole had secured it properly and invariably gave it another turn around the post.

If they got lost, Rat always knew the way, just as he had done when he rescued Mole in a snowstorm in the Wild Wood. Or that time when, on a long walk, they chanced upon Mole's old house and, not unnaturally, Mole was overcome with emotion. Not so the ever-capable Rat, who took over, got the field mice to buy food and drink and organised a splendid evening.

The trouble was that the Rat did seem to be more capable than he was. He could scull better, he knew more knots and bends [...] and he really did take care of Mole. But in spite of the friendship and kindness, Mole felt dissatisfied. He wished that Rat wasn't quite so capable and that he would let Mole try out things in his own way, even if that meant getting it wrong.

Of course, this had happened, like the first time he was in Rat's boat and grabbed the oars - and inevitably tipped the boat over. Rat had rescued him with great good humour and yet Mole thought, "If I hear Rat tell that story at dinner ever again, I shall scream!"

Mole's resentment is further fuelled as he continues on his walk and passes a group of rabbits. While they greet him politely, poor Mole is still unsettled by the encounter:

[D]id he only imagine that he heard one say in a rather horrid way, "That's strange. You don't often see Mole on his own."

Mole's political leanings are then hinted at in the closing chapter of the book, when Badger has been expatiating on his belief that "there should be One Nation and, therefore, One Wood", with "those of us who have been blessed with this world's goods [having] a responsibility towards the deserving poor":

Well I'm blowed, thought Mole. He's a blessed Tory and it's as if he's giving us his election manifesto. I'm not having that. Does he think that I'm one of his deserving poor. I'll show him!

Great fun, thoroughly convincing as regards both Mole and the paternalistic Badger, and a good example of how de Board's book adds new depth to one's enjoyment of Grahame's original.

Hopefully I'll be able to go on to some of the more central content of the book, namely the principles of "transactional analysis" used by Toad's counsellor, Heron, some of which struck me as having interesting applications more broadly, particularly as regards the church.

Excellent article by Timothy Garton Ash in today's Guardian, in which he summarises the six main views of Islam found in the west (and also, Ash argues, in many Muslim-majority countries such as Iran).

Here's my brief summary of the six views: Ash expands on each of these at more length in the article, and he suggests that "As you go down the list, you might like to put a mental tick against the view you most strongly agree with. It's logically possible to put smaller ticks against a couple of others, but not against them all":

1. The problem is religion generally, not Islam.
   


2. The problem is not religion generally, but Islam itself, which is stuck in its own middle ages and needs a Reformation.
   


3. The problem is not Islam, but the violent political ideology of Islamism.
   


4. The problem is not religion, Islam or even Islamism, but is specifically to do with Arab history and political culture.
   


5. It's all our fault: Crusades, imperialism, Israel, yada yada yada.
   


6. The biggest problems come at the interface between Islam and the west, as young Muslims are at once attracted and repelled by "the most seductive system known to humankind".

Ash then concludes:

Now, which of the six views got your largest tick? In answering that question, you will not just be saying something about the Islamic world; you will be saying something about yourself. For what we call Islam is a mirror in which we see ourselves. Tell me your Islam and I will tell you who you are.

My own view is that the real underlying cause of the problems is a combination of 2 and 3, with 6 providing the spark that turns those issues of belief and ideology into violent action, and 5 providing the rhetorical framework that is used to justify those actions.

If forced to put a "big tick" against one of these, I'd probably opt for number 3, but perhaps (as Ash suggests is the case with George Bush and Tony Blair) under a truth serum I'd "be closer to 2". Big fat cross against number 1, you won't be surprised to learn.

Feel free to give your own "scores" in the comments.

Australian blogger One Salient Oversight has an interesting post on why petrol is currently so expensive around the world. More constructive, but less amusing, than the Onion's graphic giving its own reasons for the high prices:


Then there's Philip Zec's famous cartoon from the Second World War, The Price of Petrol, which almost got the Daily Mirror closed down for sedition:


"The price of petrol has been increased by one penny" - Official.
For the full story of how the government campaign against the Mirror was led by none other than Peter Mandelson's grandfather, Herbert Morrison, click here. Herbert Morrison, like his grandson, was a rather prickly character. When someone remarked that Morrison was his own worst enemy, his fellow Labour minister Ernest Bevin replied, "Not while I'm alive he ain't".

One sad spectacle in British business over the past couple of years has been the slow downfall of Morrisons supermarkets. Morrisons, while a relatively small supermarket chain, was greatly respected in the retailing industry and the City for running excellent stores and achieving excellent profits and growth, under the decades-long stewardship of its ebullient chief executive, "professional Yorkshireman" Sir Ken Morrison. It was particularly satisfying to see a Yorkshire-based company (it was, and is, my family's local supermarket in Leeds) doing so well at competing with the more southern "big four".

Then, in 2004, Morrisons took over the smallest of those big four chains, Safeway, after a drawn-out wrangle involving competing bids and a Competition Commission enquiry. Safeway was twice the size of Morrisons and struggling badly in the face of competition from Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda, but most people were confident that the Morrisons magic could turn it round.

Alas! The merger has proved to be something of a disaster, with Morrisons' previous success now replaced by falling sales, profit warnings, southern middle-class customers expressing dissatisfaction at the more "downmarket" Morrisons approach, plunging morale among ex-Safeway staff, and now the threat of a nationwide strike over alleged plans to close three distribution depots. The likelihood is that Sir Ken will be bumped upstairs to a "Life President" role.

I was picking up a few bits and pieces in the local Safeway branch last night, and as I contemplated the glum faces of the staff it occurred to me that a parallel can be drawn between the Morrisons/Safeway merger and the invasion of Iraq.

I heartily supported the Morrisons/Safeway merger at the time, and even now it still appears less unattractive than any of the alternatives that were available at the time.

However, events since the merger have left me increasingly troubled, with a growing realisation that Morrisons bit off more than they could chew, and were really not up to the task of turning Safeway round. I still retain a lingering hope that perhaps they can turn it round and make it work in the end, but overall it looks more and more like a ghastly mistake, that Morrisons have fatally over-reached themselves. I hope to be proved wrong on that, but fear that I won't be.

Replace "Morrisons" with "the US-led coalition", and "Safeway" with "Iraq", and that's pretty much how I feel about the war/occupation at the moment, particularly when reading stories like this. The coalition has to see this job through (even if only on Colin Powell's principle that "you break it, you bought it"), but don't expect me to offer quite such eager support next time.

[Update: Daniel thought my use of the BBC as a news source was unworthy of a blogger. Well, as I said in reply, I'm British, I like the BBC - despite everything. But anyway, here's a link to Drudge's item on the same attacks, just so we can reassure ourselves they weren't invented by the liberal media ;-).]

So I've deleted my Bloglines account. I was checking it far too often and allowing myself to get distracted by it from more pressing duties. I've transferred my feeds to my home computer using the Sage plug-in for Firefox so I can still keep up with what everyone's saying, but hopefully on a less addicted, obsessive basis.

To be honest, this is part of what I suspect will be a general, gradual withdrawal from blogging over what Gordon Brown would call "the next period of time". I don't think I'm about to stop in the immediate future, but - well, I can't possibly imagine I'd still be doing this when I'm 40, or even 35, and so there's a sort of Laffer Curve effect - a curve that starts at zero, ends at zero and so necessarily reaches a peak somewhere in between. I suspect the peak is now behind me. Other duties, vocations and interests are gradually eroding the space available for this sort of thing.

The England cricket coach Duncan Fletcher has been granted UK citizenship after fifteen years of trying. Apparently the home secretary personally intervened "to ensure the row did not sour the success of England recapturing the Ashes from Australia after 18 years".

I suspect the real reason is that it means Fletcher can now be given a (much-deserved) knighthood without the British government having to undergo the humiliation of asking Robert Mugabe (of all people) for permission.

Apparently - and do please bear in mind that my source for this information is that fountain of constitutional wisdom, the Guardian's over-by-over commentary - for a foreign national to be given a knighthood, their own head of government must agree to this.

Fletcher is a Zimbabwean national, so that would have given Mugabe a heaven-sent opportunity to embarrass Tony Blair. Hence Charles Clarke's timely decision to use his discretionary powers on the grounds that "Mr Fletcher deserve[s] to be granted citizenship". (Whereas had England lost yesterday, presumably Fletcher would have put onto the first plane back to Harare...)

Self-fulfilling prophecies of our time... there are now hour-long queues forming at petrol stations, not because of a lack of fuel, but because people are afraid that there may be a lack of fuel later in the week. Of course, that means that there is now a shortage of fuel. Ho-hum.

Mind you, we took care to fill up the car at the first petrol station we came to upon arriving back in the UK on Sunday, when we could probably have made it home on what was in the tank. But as I pointed out to my wife, there's an irregular verb at work here:

• I am exercising prudent and reasonable foresight.
  


• You are panic-buying.
  


• He is a hoarder.

As in the last fuel protests in 2000, a bizarre inversion of attitudes can be seen in the press, with the Guardian calling for the smack of firm government against the protesters' "illegal secondary picketing", and the Telegraph providing a sympathic profile of one of the ringleaders the "farmer ready to fight again over a 'plain and simple injustice'".

"Developing...", as they say.

...England have won the Ashes! Yay!

At times, it seems like my only memories of cricket are of 5-0 drubbings by the West Indies in the 1980s, and humiliating defeats by the likes of Zimbabwe during the 1990s (one such result prompting the immortal newspaper headline, "England find a new way to lose"). So seeing Michael Vaughan kiss the Ashes was a very sweet moment.

(Incidentally, is that the first time an England captain has kissed the Ashes at all? Can't imagine earlier captains - Len Hutton? Ray Illingworth? Brian Close??? - doing anything so demonstrative. A gruff, manly handshake on the pavilion balcony would be about your limit.)

Freddie Flintoff won the Compton-Miller Medal for Man of the Series - thoroughly deserved, though to be honest (and to float for a moment on a cloud of happy magnanimity) I'd have given it to Shane Warne, as the man who actually made a series of it at all. What a summer.

Must dash - the highlights have just started...

Update: Al has the best picture I've seen so far, here. So that's what happiness looks like!

...but may still be a few days before normal service is resumed here.

Am currently Otherwise Engaged by (i) the new-look "Berliner" Guardian, which looks rather splendid so far (browse it online for free here); and (ii) the Ashes, where England are now 199-7 in what promises to be a very tight end to a very tight series. My suspicion is that Australia will nick it, but then I'm always overly pessimistic about these things, largely as a self-defence mechanism. (Update: England have now made it to tea with three wickets in hand. Barring a very rapid post-tea collapse and the greatest batting performance in Test history from Australia, I reckon we're there.)

My holiday reading included Counselling for Toads (in which Mr Toad from Wind in the Willows sees a counsellor - much better than it sounds, being utterly convincing in its depiction of Toad's "backstory", and providing an illuminating introduction to counselling) and the first 525 pages or so of E.P. Thompson's 850-page behemoth, The Making of the English Working Class (as recommended by DS Ketelby - thanks, DS!).

Mr Toad will probably make an appearance here this week; Mr Thompson (who really doesn't like John Wesley or William Wilberforce at all) may or may not, depending on how much I feel like stirring up the hornets' nest of politics round here again (answer: not very).

Off to Brittany for a week or so. If ten days in France aren't enough to reconcile me to the merits of Anglo-Saxon capitalism then nothing will be. ;-)