The Land Surveyor

David Aaranovich on “faith”

I’m not sure how much one should engage with Aaranovich because it could become a depressing lifetime’s occupation, but this piece in the Observer yesterday was such an appalling mess that I was staggered that it could appear in a national broadsheet by someone adjudicated by his peers to be “Columnist of the Year”.

He recounts how an Islamic theologian tells him that only religion gives a “proper basis for ideas and morality”. Instead of just flatly rebutting this absurdity Aaranovich segués into talking about the distinction between “secularism” and “atheism”, seemingly conceding that atheism is indeed “arid” but secularism is better because it “holds the ring between competing faiths” rather than denying them. For the record, secularism in Webster’s Online is defined as “indifference to or rejection or exclusion of religion and religious considerations”. Aaranovich’s misuse of the term “secularism” is at the heart of why his article is a mess. For Aaranovich to say “my secularism is more important than my atheism and binds me with those who have faith and those who have none” is effectively meaningless. If he is an atheist, he rejects religion, and he can’t “bind himself” to those with a faith.

He invokes “secular Jews” and “secular Muslims” in support of his wrong-headed understanding of secularism, but to me these terms refer to people who have a respect for the fact that their cultural identity is bound up with a religion but who no longer profess the religious faith that was at the heart of that culture. And in that sense I am happy to call myself a secular Christian – I understand that Christianity is an important part of British heritage and that it shaped (and crucially was also shaped by) much of what one would call British culture. But sensitivity to the historic role played in a culture by religion is not inconsistent with rejecting all claims to “revealed truth” of that religious worldview. To me that’s what secularism is, and it’s not that different from atheism.

He then seems to reassert his own atheistic belief but then tacks on this: “Even so, it seems impolite and unnecessary to tell a practising Jew that I set her faith absolutely no higher than the voodoo of Haiti or the idol-worship of the poor old Philistines.” I personally think this is pretty demeaning about voodoo and non-Abrahamic religions anyway which frankly have no less cultural validity than the nice lady’s Judaism. But it seems that the nub of Aaranovich’s argument is that David just really doesn’t want to be impolite to respectable people who have a religious faith. But I would say that if you believe that the claims of revealed religion are bullshit, you really have to be happy to say so, or get out of the business of cultural commentating.

And then he carries on wittering, saying that there is no real difference between Catholicism and Anglicanism. Well he should check out some of the amusing stuff here about Blair being told not to take Mass and having to wait until he leaves office before he can convert to the Old Faith – the distinctions seem pretty real to the people who take these things seriously.

But Aaranovich the theologian does not stop there. He blurts out “have you polled them?” on a radio show in response to a Muslim saying in some cultures women did not want equal rights. From being so desperate to be sensitive to the lady’s Judaism he has zero sensitivity for the cultural traditions of Islamic societies and bashes them with a blunt assertion of the superiority of the values of modern western culture. I don’t want to make apologies for repression of women that goes on in some Islamic cultures, but resistance to western “modernity” among these cultures is much more broad-based and cannot be simply delegitimated by a crass call to “poll” whether people want western values or not. He might anyway be surprised at the negativity of the result.

And he carries off on this to condemn all the established religions for their unequal treatment of women and suddenly he seems to want “secularists” [sic] to fight religions head on, but not of course with anything too confrontational like a headscarf ban, but with “stronger arguments” and “stronger alternatives”. How these “holding the ring between religions” Aaranovich-secularists are going to come up with any arguments at all in the theological morass he starts them from seems a bewildering prospect.

Media and hostage taking in Iraq

I don’t want to sound insensitive to the appalling plight of the British hostage Kenneth Bigley in Iraq, but it is extraordinary to watch how this kind of story transfixes a national media, to the extent that in this case it “casts a shadow over the UK Labour party conference” and shows the “sophistication” of the terrorists (quotes from the Observer) in pushing Iraq back to the top of the news agenda in the conference week.

We avert our gaze every day from the heart-rending griefs of others all around us, whether at home or abroad. Military policy, whether in Iraq or elsewhere, requires that the awful bloodiness of its consequences be shielded from the view of the democratic public which has no stomach to observe the sharp end of what is entailed by being “strong on defence”. Military force requires for its effectiveness a necessary complicity on the part of the media not to undermine the political support for it by being too graphic in its reportage of the carnage.

The media chooses every day not to show inconsolable mothers, wives and children bereaved of their sons, husbands and fathers. It chooses every day not to show dead bodies, amputees, people blinded and mutilated by conflict. Yet each of these griefs represents a genuine piece of potential reportage. So when the chief editor of ITV News says they are being “terribly, terribly cautious” about reporting of hostage situations it seems to be slightly surreal. Somehow a collective media decision has been taken – and this is true across Europe – that the chilling drama of hostage-taking, deliberately undertaken to humiliate national governments, represents front page copy, whereas merely dead bodies or broken lives, devoid as they are of any “what happened next” cliff-hanging tension are merely quiet statistics to a public not willing to endure seeing these tragedies close up every day. As Polly Toynbee elegantly argued here, the BBC, and any other national flagship media outlets, cannot justify their reporting decisions based on what the sensationalist media sees as significant. The issue at stake is precisely one of determining what is appropriate media reporting in a war situation, and these organisations precisely ought to be attempting to set this agenda and not be following one made by others. Perhaps we are in a situation where sensational grief-stricken dramas which are callously undertaken precisely to get the attention of the media will always be front page news. If so, just don’t let us hear how “terribly, terribly cautious” media executives are before they serve this to us again.

Liberal/conservative asymmetry in a short attention-span world

A sizeable chunk of conservative latency within modern democratic populations rests on a disinterestedness in politics, a tuning out of the “bickering from the beltway”.

Against the backdrop of this disinterestedness conservative politicians have a more simple political proposition than liberals. They are able to trade on a “benefit of the doubt” principle, namely that they are hard-headed managers whose prime interest is the security and increased wealth of the nation, whereas liberals are always under a suspicion of being willing to sacrifice wealth and security in the name of a better conscience.

And there is a strong perception hanging over from the 1960´s and1970´s that pandering to the particularist interests of the liberal constituency – e.g. greater labour union power, higher taxation and welfare provision – is deleterious to the overall wealth generating capability of the economy, whereas pandering to the particularist interests of big business strengthens the economy overall. And it seems evident that there is some truth to this perception, especially as the magical “3rd Way” economy of Germany has stagnated in recent years. Again this predisposes a bias towards letting conservatives “just get on with it” whereas liberals can’t simply “be trusted” in case they give away too much to their constituencies, making conservatives the default option for a population with a short political attention-span.

Also militating against progressive politics is the sheer volume of claims on the good conscience of the people – domestic poverty and social mobility, childcare provision, nursery education, gay marriage, international poverty, the aids pandemic, third world debt, global terms of trade, israel-palestine, greenhouse gases, sustainable development, ethical foreign policy etc. The politically disinterested population tunes out from this frightening cacophony and retreats to the simple conservative message of a preservation of the status quo and the defence of the strong self-interest of the State.

The American Civil War – an exercise in conservative rhetoric

It is noteworthy how antipathy to Southern slavery in the North of the US and in England co-existed in those societies with thoroughgoing racism, imperialist exploitation, destitution based on cultural division (e.g. Ireland) and indifference to the manufacturing poor, and most tellingly, indifference to the plight of emancipated blacks after the Civil War. (Similarly, when slavery was abolished in the West Indies the UK exchequer paid vast fortunes to compensate slave owners and made no provision whatsoever for former slaves). Calhoun, a prominent Southern defender of slavery, had argued that even if slavery were abolished, blacks would still be in a position of economic vassalage in the South, which is in fact what turned out to be the case. The unwillingness of the North to spend equivalent moral or physical capital in addressing this adds to the strangeness of the antipathy of the North toward slavery. It is as though some Northern politicians, and Lincoln is a good example, developed a strong aesthetic distaste for the institution of slavery as an affront to their moral conception of the Nation, but they lacked a similar distaste for the more prosaic economic destitution of the emancipated slaves, and after the achievement of emancipation their moral wind was spent.

Calhoun did not deny the injustice of slavery but he attempted to portray it as intrinsically no different to the many other on-going injustices which were seen as acceptable at the time and he complained that the Northern effort to abolish the particular injustice of slavery was arbitrary and was also self-serving in respect of the emerging kulturkampf between the industrialising North vs. the old South. And in some sense one has a sympathy with Calhoun´s conservative critique, however self-serving it was itself. Taking moral medicine from the Yankees and the British as they were enjoying their most ascendant phases of subjugation of indigenous peoples the world over may have tasted somewhat bitter.

The American Civil War – defence of interests against moral intervention

Trying to put oneself in the mind of the average confederate in the American Civil War who fought so keenly in defence of the old order of the South and the slavery which underpinned it, it is so easy to condemn the confederacy as a bad as well as a lost cause, as one that stood against the progressive march of history. But I think today one could argue that a similarly “unanswerable” claim to justice is that which the deep impoverishment of the 3rd world can make against the West. But just as then, I think the vast majority of citizens of the West would resist a significant economic dislocation in answer to the justice of this demand, and would in fact fight hard to resist it, and dress their cause up in terms of defence of their liberties and rights of self determination. The West sustains itself at the expense of innumerable injustices, but will not willingly see itself even partially unraveled by the claims to justice of what in retrospect might seem an unanswerable historically progressive cause.

Thinking too how the conflict over slavery was put off for such a long time, essentially being avoided by a series of “gradualist” memes in political rhetoric, including famously Lincoln’s belief that the founding fathers intended that slavery die “a natural death”, even if it took 100 years. While of course awaiting the “natural death” in fact saw a new burgeoning of slavery with the shift from the sugar to the cotton economy.

And we have in our time the neat gradualist “failure of redistribution” meme, namely that the particular injustice of 1st vs. 3rd world can only be rectified by roots-up development, that sacrifice on the part of the West is not part of the equation and would all be “wasted”. So no bad conscience in the West, meanwhile the economic inequality “gradually” just gets bigger.