Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 293

If the zealots truly cared about equality, they'd fight for female dustmen

 

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday Column

All sorts of people who don’t believe in God and wouldn’t know one end of a canticle from the other have suddenly developed bilious, enraged opinions on bishops.
Now that (as universally and inaccurately reported) women have been told they can’t be bishops, the country is aflame with simulated rage.

I have to confess here that I am actually a member of the Church of England who goes to church more or less weekly, skulks at the back behind a  pillar, sings like a donkey and occasionally reads the lesson.  And I couldn’t give two hoots what sex the bishop is.
I strongly prefer them to believe in God, and it’s good if they’re educated, intelligent and not too oily (oiliness is, alas, common among these functionaries).
But in the end, they’re just area managers, who wear increasingly peculiar hats, often yellow for some unexplained reason, and who tend to follow a rather soppy political line in the House of Lords.

What’s really going on here is  a frenzy of dogmatic equality, part of a general campaign to abolish the old idea that men did some things, and women others.
Funnily enough, it only applies to certain jobs. I’ve never seen a campaign for male dinner-ladies, or for female dustcart drivers. It’s the traditionally male preserves, with a high standing, that get the treatment.
The most absurd of these has been the campaign to have female quotas in the fire brigade. The main result of this hatchet-faced dogma has been the lowering of strength and fitness standards so that lots of weedy men now get in.
The number of women (several of them admirably fit and strong, I might add) remains tiny.

If you’re interested in the truth rather than the propaganda about the Church, the critics of women bishops don’t actually oppose them being appointed.
The radical campaigners (who seem to me to put ideology before God) could have had their mitres years ago if they hadn’t insisted on unconditional surrender from the small but significant group who don’t agree with them.

All these dissenters want is some firm safeguards for two groups of Anglican Christians who, in all conscience, can’t accept the authority of a female bishop in their own lives.
I know some of these people. They are serious and devoted servants of the Church, some very Catholic, and so loyal to ancient tradition, and some very Protestant and so bound by the words of the Bible.
Several of them are women who have risen high in male-dominated professions. It is precisely because they are so devoted and serious that the Church should not drive them away.

My Church, yours too if you choose to make it so, is mocked for its wishy-washy ways and its mildness.
But in many parts of the country it is the only remaining force living in the midst of poverty and crime, and standing up for goodness.
Places where the police don’t trouble to go much, and where Social Services go home for the weekend, still have a C of E vicarage, open night and day.
And it is wishy-washy precisely because in the end it preferred compromise to cruel, murderous purity.
It is that wise willingness to respect the sincere and honest disagreements of others, in the cause of goodness, that is really under discussion here.

Do not be stampeded by fashion into supporting a bunch of impatient zealots.

 

Brilliant movie... shame it ignores the truth

One of the best films of  the year is Argo, about the amazing rescue of six American diplomats from Tehran at the height of the Ayatollahs’ revolution.
The heroes are Canadians, who are rightly praised  for sheltering the six and probably saving their lives.

But once again an American film has badly distorted history.

At one point a character actually says that Britain and New Zealand refused  to help the US fugitives.
This is flatly untrue. At great risk to themselves, New Zealand and British diplomats most certainly did help the six.
It seems that the truth has been traduced to make the film a tighter drama.
If you are dealing with factual events, you can obviously leave things out, and perhaps invent a scene or two to get over the fact that real life is often dull  or hard to explain.
But in dramas about real events, direct historical untruth which makes good people look bad is surely wrong.
As with that dreadful, rubbishy film The King’s Speech, many will come  to believe what they see.

 

At last, the cracks are showing in the racism con

For many years I have pointed out that the word 'racist' is an insulting slander, designed to smear good people and drive them out of public life.
I have myself been charged with ‘moral racism’ by an enraged and hysterical book reviewer in The Guardian, for daring to dissent from the establishment view that cannabis is cool.
I have even been accused, on Twitter, of riding my bicycle in a racist fashion through the streets of Cambridge.
As with the good and selfless foster parents, persecuted and insulted by snivelling, insolent officials because they belong to UKIP, the accuser cannot produce any evidence that the accused is a racial bigot.

That is because there isn’t any.

What the word means is ‘someone who doesn’t agree with the politically correct, multicultural consensus’.
What it also means is that the new establishment will not even argue with such people.
It will try to crush and silence them, by scaring them and smearing them, and lying that they are unreasoning bigots. In truth, many of the worst and most unreasoning bigots in this country are the Left themselves.
They hate anyone who dares to disagree with them, and their policies have led to deep and lasting ethnic divisions which could easily have been avoided.
They long ago stopped thinking, believing they were secure in power. But  perhaps they have been too complacent. People are beginning to understand their lies, and they may not work much longer.

Police with pistols strapped to their thighs have begun to appear at Paddington railway station in London.
The excuse, as always, is terrorism. But I’m far more scared by the actual presence of people carrying these inaccurate weapons than I am by the theoretical danger  of a bomb.
If we’re going to have an armed police force, shouldn’t Parliament pass a law permitting it?

 

 

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Am I a Rubber Dinghy?

I accept that the title of this posting sounds like one of those Radio 4 programmes about Psychiatry, or the title of a painting by that fascinating Belgian, Rene Magritte.

But actually it is a reference to an attack on me by Tim Montgomerie, of 'Conservative Home', which readers can find here. http://conservativehome.blogs.com/majority_conservatism/2012/11/trust-in-polling-not-punditry.html#idc-container

Alas, I lack the facilities to retaliate with a drawing of the Tory party as a foundering tramp steamer, streaked with rust and very low in the water as its captain stands, wreathed in beatific smiles and apparently wholly unware of the ominous sloshing and gurgling from below, , on the bridge, (perhaps marrying two men as he keeps one languid hand on the wheel), while the crew and passengers either plunge overboard in despair or stand shivering on the bulwarks, trying to persuade themselves that the poor old bark will reach port one day.

 

Of course, Mr Montgomerie has failed to register, as so many Tory loyalists do, that I am way ahead of him. I understood long ago what reality will make clear to him in 2015 - the Tory Party is finished and cannot be saved. The only question is what we should do about that.

 

A summary of my position can still be found here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/10/the-tories-are-.html

 

 

Covenant with Death

With some books you never wholly forget the first time. In this case I recall a fattish Pan paperback, with the lurid cover that publisher liked to provide, and I remember sitting with it in the dusty corner of an old-fashioned railway compartment, with its sagging red seat cover and its pictures of seaside resorts. This was some time in the early 1960s, rambling and rattling behind a wheezing black steam locomotive, from the South Midlands down towards Devon and a holiday by the sea.

 

I think our destination was Budleigh Salterton, now long robbed of its station, whose platform had – as they often then did – little gardens, on which the words ‘the West is Best with Budleigh Salterton’ were picked out in white stones. It was, I think, the last time we went to the beach by train. It was hot. And it was slow. They were taking down the old-fashioned semaphore signals and replacing them with the coloured light ones that have been going wrong ever since.

The fact that I can’t recall much else of the journey is because I was lost in the book, which I’ve since re-read twice (the last time, last week, finishing it around midnight because, although I know the end all too well in more ways than one, it would have been painful to leave it till another time). The last line ‘Two years in the making. Ten minutes in the destroying. That was our history’, ought to be carved in stone somewhere.

 

It is ‘Covenant With Death’ by John Harris, and I’m always surprised that it is not better known. Firstly because it is a sparely but superbly written book, the fruit of a great deal of careful, detailed research and a fair amount of passion. And secondly because it concerns one of the most important historical events of the last 100 years, the destruction of the flower of British manhood ( and plenty of Irish manhood too) in the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. Thirdly, because of the very grim and harsh title, itself taken from a ferocious passage in Isaiah which I once caused to be read at a school Remembrance Service, where I had been invited to preach.

 

It runs :’ Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves.’ It’s Chapter 28, if you wish to see how the covenant with death works out. Not well. ‘Hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies’. The narrator of the book, a newspaper reporter alone in the world, roots out his father’s old Bible as he prepared to go overseas for war, and finds that this was the passage the old man had been reading just before he died.

 

Harris, a journalist and cartoonist in Sheffield, went out to find men from that city who had volunteered to fight in the great rush of patriotic feeling in August 1914 and who had survived the Somme. He listened very carefully to what they told him. As a result, I suspect this is one of the most authentic accounts of what those volunteers actually experienced, but it is all bound together with a rapid, intelligent narrative in which we meet believable young men of that era, from well-read university men to unlettered petty criminals. They are portrayed as they were, utterly different from us and yet wholly like us, far more English (or Scottish, or Irish), more Christian, more innocent more individual, yet with much the same sort of humour.

 

I could spend hours summarising it. I won’t, because you’ll have to get hold of it and read it. It is shocking to me that it doesn’t seem to be in print, though the second-hand shops must still contain legions of old copies. These things leap into my mind: the description of the great legions of men, so full of certainty that they were about to win a righteous victory that they spontaneously sang in their bivouacs, as they never would again ; then the dawning realisation, as they gather for the assault, that the Germans know they are coming, even know which units they belong to, and that the barbed wire has not been cut, as the staff have promised. The men know it. The officers know it. But nobody will do anything about it. Everyone knows it will go wrong. They know that they will die. But they go forward anyway.

And then afterwards, the desolate sound made by thousands of wounded men, a few hours ago in their happy prime, now become in effect small boys again and weeping terribly for their mothers. And the dawning realisation, in the rear echelons, as the broken units return, that hardly anyone has survived whole. For that restrained age, the descriptions of wounds, and of the manner of men’s deaths, is remarkably graphic. I’d go so far to say that this book does for Battle of the Somme what ‘The Cruel Sea’ did for the Battle of the Atlantic. Find it. Read it. You’ll be a better person for having done so, and less inclined to believe revisionist twaddle about how Douglas Haig was all right really. He was a bloody fool, and so were his political masters. Funny that I’ve carried the same version of this event in my head , unaltered, through so many different political opinions.

Millican, begin again? No thank you, if it's all the same

I reproduce below a long posting from Professor Millican, which some of you may have missed, on the  ‘The Millican Brief’ thread. I shall accept the Professor’s invitation to draw stumps and go home.

Why?  It was not an argument I sought, as I have long believed this sort of disputation to be both futile and tedious. I was only ever interested in getting him to discuss his reasons for believing there to be no God, and, though I have repeatedly made this clear,  he has declined to engage me on this ground, preferring subjective claims of ‘probability’ which simply push the question ‘why?’ further away.  As for there only being two types of universe, a suggestion he airily dismisses, it seems to me that on this question there is indeed such a straight choice and I can see no escape from it .

 

Much of modern materialist thought consists of finding ingenious ways to deny the possibility that something which appears to have been designed, has been designed. Why would that be?

 

I have no doubt that he had a nicer time with Professor Lennox, a much better person than I am, a more learned person than I am or could ever be, and a man interested in theological disputation in a way that I will never be, and one who, being a bit saintly,  does not share my impatience with the arrogance and smugness of many atheists (a charge I did not and do not direct against Professor Millican, who has always been perfectly polite, but which I did direct against his allies in the Oxford debate).

 

My part in this debate is - as I explain in my book, a copy of which I sent to Professor Millican during our exchange – to rebut and trouble that arrogance and smugness. This is darkening counsel by words without knowledge. We do not know. We do not even probably know. Therefore their belief is a choice, and so is mine. Much of the ‘New Atheist’ approach consists of scornful, intemperate and in some cases (see my book) totalitarian dismissal of believers.  It is only by keeping company with such people that Professor Millican came into contact with me, their enemy. If he is not among them, and disapproves of their approach, then he and I have no quarrel, as I strongly believe others should be free to believe what they wish.

 

Comments on this blog are (despite frequent complaints and allegations) not censored, though they are subject to English law, which prevents certain things being published and to some clear rules, well-known and cautiously enforced. I long ago learned to ignore or laugh off many of the hurtful things said about me here by my critics and detractors. I can see that an Oxford academic might find our hurly-burly pretty intolerable, and I regret that he has been exposed to it. Perhaps their authors might consider, in future, the feelings of gentler guests here. As for my own approach to the Professor, I think I have been quite fair, though robust. Of course he is very welcome to reply to this if he wishes. But unless he wants to tell us why he is so anxious for there not to be a God (roughly as that paragon among atheist philosophers, Thomas Nagel, puts the question, as discussed in my book), I think I’ve said all I want to, and will end as I began in Oxford with the words of God, speaking from the whirlwind, in Job, Chapter XXXVIII

 

 ‘Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding.

 

‘Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the corner stone thereof?’

 

Professor Millican’s words (which I have divided up a bit, perhaps not as he would have done, for ease of reading) are as follows:

 

 

 'This week has been so busy with teaching, organisation of the admissions process, and other College business (including a genial and informative but frank debate on theism with John Lennox) that this discussion has been completely out of my mind. On reviewing the blog this morning after waking at an unseemly hour, however, I find it rather depressing to see that my silence has been interpreted by some of your bloggers as motivated by weakness in my position, with the same sort of unpleasant confidence that you show in claiming to know the motivations of others better than they do themselves. I have no idea where this confidence comes from (certainly I've seen no serious evidence provided), but fear that Mick (19 Nov, 07:14 PM) may have summed up the situation quite well.

 

Before signing off, and to avoid repeating what has gone before, I shall make some relatively brief (but necessarily numerous) points on your long post: (a) I note that you say that you would continue to believe in God even if the odds against His existence were massive - say 1,000,000 to 1. This, to me, seems almost definitive of a form of irrationality: a person who forms beliefs like this is - obviously - overwhelmingly likely to have a false belief. (b) In saying that "there is no comparable choice" (to that about God), you do seem to me to be making exactly the same mistake as Pascal in his Wager: namely, assuming that there are only two possible theories about the Universe. (c) You insist on a certain hypothesis about my motivation - a *psychological* hypothesis (since motivation is a psychological phenomenon). I call this hypothesis "gratuitous" because you has given no evidence for it. I'm baffled that you seem not to understand this. (d) The following passage could serve as a nice illustration for a class on logical fallacies: "No ‘psychology’ is necessary to divine why someone might choose what is, on the face of it, by far the less attractive of the two options, namely that our lives have no point, purpose or meaning, and that ‘what will survive of us’ is not love, but nothing. If someone doesn’t want justice for himself or anyone else, it really doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes, or Sigmund Freud, to work out why. ... If Professor Millican has other motives for preferring meaningless chaos to purpose and justice, then I am only too willing to hear them."

 

Here you simply take for granted the entire point at issue - namely, that my own belief is indeed based on a choice (i.e. your own psychological hypothesis, which is not supported by anything that I have said). For the avoidance of doubt, I would indeed prefer a just world, as you would, but my beliefs do not simply follow my preferences: I aim to conform them to reality and probable truth rather than fantasy and potential million-to-one-against improbabilities. (e) You say: "There is indeed a great deal of evidence for God’s existence. But it is not of the type which can be ‘confirmed’ or ‘disconfirmed’ (which I assume are synonyms for ‘proved’ and ‘disproved’)" This is a misunderstanding, because when I talk about potential "confirming or disconfirming evidence" I simply mean evidence that would tend to increase or decrease the probability of God's existence (this usage is quite standard in technical discussion). And I have never said or implied that I would accept the existence of God only if it were proved by some manifestation "which can be explained by the existence of God *and in no other way*" (your words). It would be quite enough to lead me to believe if I assessed evidence as making God's existence more probable than not, but sadly I don't think probability tells that way.

 

Moreover you are the one who has said openly that you would believe what you do even if probability were massively against you - so *you* are the dogmatist here, apparently refusing to countenance any objection short of logical demonstration. (f) You say: "Either the Cosmos was designed and created by a rational force with intent (let’s call it ‘God’) or it just happened. If it wasn’t deliberate and planned, then it was an accident." You seem to be using the word "accident" to cover *anything at all* that doesn't involve a cosmic designer. That's a perverse usage. A theory of cosmic evolution, for example, wouldn't imply that the development of the universe was an *accident*, any more than the evolutionary process whereby predator and prey co-evolve to run faster is an accident (even though random factors will presumably have played some part in the precise outcome). It's not an *accident* that prey animals which can run faster are more likely to survive longer and have more offspring - it follows from the logic of the probabilities involved. Some people think that universes can evolve too - I'm not committed to this, but it serves as an illustration of a third way between "design" and "accident". (g) I am not a dogmatic materialist, partly because I think the notion of "material substance" is very unclear and ill-defined. The same problem infects the notion of an "immaterial soul", but in so far as sense can be made of this, it seems to me that ordinary experience casts serious doubt on it. This is not "dogma", but based on evidence (e.g. from drugs, alcohol, brain injury, tiredness, Alzheimer's etc.) that our thought depends on the state of our brain, so it therefore seems unlikely that our thought could survive the death of our brain.

 

 

 (h) The three-sentence argument I gave was entirely logical. You seem to be confused because you apparently take for granted that within a discussion of the existence of God, *any* part of *any* argument presented must have that same focus. In fact, this short argument was not to do with God directly. It simply appealed to the very commonplace fact that human expertise is valued (at least in part) *precisely* because it *cannot* be reduced to formulaic rules. In other words, as I repeat and repeat again: "lack of precise 'objective' measurement is no obstacle to the application of rational judgement; nor to the recognition that some answers are better warranted than others". You say that you agree with this, so what's so difficult about noticing that my little argument was designed precisely to support this proposition, just as I said it was? It should also then be fairly easy to see why this proposition is pertinent to what you had said was an accurate summary of your position on God. If you really can't see this, then I think we'd better give up trying to have any sort of rational engagement. (i)

 

 

Last Monday's debate with John Lennox, with the participation of most of the Hertford College philosophy students, proved by example that "rational engagement between the two sides" is perfectly possible. Rational engagement does become well-nigh impossible, however, when one of the sides insists on an indifference to probabilities and on interpreting all of the opponent's views in terms of wish-fulfilment rather than a genuine attempt to provide rational evidence. (j) The fact that an issue has not yet been resolved to the satisfaction of all reasonable people gives no proof - and barely any evidence - that rational engagement is impossible (would you say the same about political questions, I wonder?). It just indicates that the question is a difficult one, like most of those that philosophers concern themselves with. Incidentally there are cases of ex-theists who have been persuaded by the arguments. I am one. (k) I acknowledge that it's *possible* that the universe could be wonderful in a way that completely transcends our understanding. But this mere possibility is not evidence. We are stuck with the evidence that is accessible to us, and my point was simply that one could reasonably expect this to reflect, at least to some extent, the supposedly supreme wonderfulness of an infinitely perfect Designer. (l) In response to my question: "But are you also denying that there is a rationally significant balance of evidence either way, such as might determine a reasonable person's belief (independently of his or her wishes)?" you say: "Yes. I have always taken this position." But you also say: "I thought, in this passage : ‘Hence it is hard to combine your view that there is no rationally significant evidence for or against theism, with your view that it is vital to make a decision on the matter in line with what we apprehend to be theism's practical consequences.’ that he had substituted the word ‘evidence’ for ‘proof’ and that this was a bit naughty."

 

This is ridiculous! I was interpreting *your* view as claiming a lack of "rationally significant evidence", and you have acknowledged that this interpretation was *correct* (for you "have always taken this position"). Yet in the very passage where I presented this interpretation, you now accuse me of having illicitly introduced the word "evidence" in place of "proof"! *I meant evidence*, and you have acknowledged that in saying this, I got *your* meaning right too! I have set out in this debate to try to represent your views fairly, to ask for your confirmation that I have done so, and then to engage with them rationally. It does not seem to me that you, in return, have been much interested in rational engagement, since you so insist on misrepresenting what I have said, and trying to score points rather than addressing my own with any care or precision. Hence, sadly, I fear that any further discussion will probably be a waste of time. I have found this, in its way, an interesting learning experience, but I doubt whether any more enlightenment is to be had from it. The contrast with my debate with John Lennox - in which points made for and against the existence of God followed a comprehensible logical progression in which both parties had plenty to say (to the great interest of my students, and without a hint of insult or psychological deconstruction on either side) - is rather striking.'

Escaping from the Ayatollahs - a fine film, but is it true?

Once again we have to wonder how far you can travel from the truth when you make a film about a real event. First, I recommend strongly that people go to see ‘Argo’, a film about an absurd but effective plan to get six American diplomats out of Iran, at a time when most of their colleagues were hostages, and when capture would have meant almost certain death. This whole article will be a plot spoiler, so please don’t read on if you prefer the whole thing to be a surprise - but the story is quite widely known, and the film holds on to you till the very end, even though you know how it will finish.

 

First, here are some good things. The invasion and seizure of the US Embassy in the Persian capital is superbly portrayed, not overdone, almost matter-of-fact, as such horrible things look and sound when they actually happen. People who have been entitled to think themselves safe are suddenly not safe at all, because they have been transferred into a world where the rules no longer apply. It’s the wise, pessimistic cynics who tell their colleagues ‘Nobody is coming’, as they absurdly dial the Iranian government for help against the mob. The horrible, self-righteous droning of revolutionary tribunals (which these days like to have women as their mouthpieces) is superbly portrayed.

 

And a truly wonderful job has been done in recreating the appalling fashions of the late 1970s and early 1980s, especially in the Washington DC scenes. This era is now becoming the day before yesterday to a whole generation, who thought at the time that it was a modern era and an improvement on the past. Now, with its electric typewriters, appalling trousers, self-harming eyewear fashions, and unhinged hairstyles, it looks more like a serious wrong turning in human development, which we really ought to have pre-empted or avoided. I remember it all too well. I know roughly what I was doing when the events in this film were unfolding. A whole era is disinterred by these glimpses of proof that we really haven’t a clue what we are doing while we are doing it, and that our comical fashion victimhood applies to ideas just as much as it does to apparel. If only we could learn to see the present as clearly as we see the past we might, for instance, do something about antidepressants in time to save a lot of people from needless regret.

 

What happens next is that half a dozen Americans, junior diplomats mostly unequipped by life or training for a clandestine or adventurous life, realise that they are free to leave before the Ayatollah’s Revolutionary Guards take over their part of the Embassy, which has its own independent way out to the street. What do they do? Where do they go? Well, they end up in the Canadian Ambassador’s quite modest residence, and he and his wife, and their Persian housekeeper (perhaps, in retrospect, the bravest of all because she was the most exposed to the danger of death) , rightly get a lot of credit for their considerable nerve in sheltering them there. But at one stage in the film it is said that the ‘Brits’ and the ‘Kiwis’ refused to help them.

 

Is this true? Well, according to a report in the ‘Sunday Telegraph’ of 21st October, it isn’t. Read this : ’Sir John Graham, 86, who was Britain's ambassador to Iran at the time, said: "It is not the truth that they were turned away from the British Embassy. We gave them all help at the time. My concern is that the inaccurate account should not enter the mythology of the events in Tehran in November 1979." Arthur Wyatt, 83, who was the British charge d'affaires in Tehran, said: "I'm disappointed to hear how we have been portrayed. The Americans fetched up at our summer compound in northern Tehran, and I think they stayed there for one night. If it had been discovered we were helping them I can assure you we'd all have been for the high jump." Mr Wyatt, who served as a diplomat for 45 years, was awarded the Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George for his work in Tehran in recognition of the risks he took at the time. Mr Wyatt also sent supplies to three American diplomats hiding elsewhere in Tehran, another act of kindness unrecognised in Argo.

 

He said: "The revolutionary regime ignored all the rules of diplomatic protection and the Vienna Convention. When they over-ran our embassy too, I said to one of them: 'You can't do this; we're diplomats.' He just waved his machine pistol around and replied, 'This is what matters.'" Affleck has admitted agonising over taking liberties with history but said he had depicted events "as best I can, factually". The script also fails to credit the New Zealand diplomats who helped the group's passage to safety. "I struggled with this long and hard, because it casts Britain and New Zealand in a way that is not totally fair," Affleck conceded. "But I was setting up a situation where you needed to get a sense that these six people had nowhere else to go. It does not mean to diminish anyone." Robert Anders, 87, a former US consular officer and one of the six who were smuggled out, told The Sunday Telegraph: "If the Iranians were going to start looking for people they would probably look to the British. So it was too risky to stay and we moved on. They put their lives on the line for us. We're forever grateful."

 

I really don’t see why this act of courage should not have got a mention. And if it couldn’t be mentioned, I don’t see why the British and New Zealand diplomats had to be mentioned at all. I love Canada, and am completely unsurprised by the role of its Ambassador in this story. But I’m also sure the Canadians wouldn’t mind someone else getting a bit of the credit. There it is. The absurd plot – the invention of an (atrocious) Sci-Fi film by Hollywood executives, to provide the hostages with cover for their exit, is beautifully and hilariously (if profanely) done. Parts of the film reminded me strongly of another favourite film about the CIA, ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’. Jimmy Carter comes quite well out of events, as he often does. As for the ending, it’s some of the best melodrama you’ll see this decade. And if , afterwards, you feel that maybe it wasn’t quite like that, you’ll be right. But it somehow doesn’t matter, as in this section no profound untruth is told.

 

A spare, accurate account (‘The True Spy Story behind Argo’ is provided by Nate Jones in ‘Foreign Affairs’ Magazine, and can be found on the web. But, hugely as I enjoyed it, ad much as I recommend it as a far better film than ‘Skyfall’, given rather a poor launch by the film industry and confined, when I saw it, to a cinema so small my nose (admittedly large) almost touched the screen, I still resent the way my own country’s role is portrayed. No doubt I’ll be told (as I was over the ghastly ‘King’s Speech’ that it’s only a film. Well, so it is. But how many people get their idea of Lawrence of Arabia from the film of that name, and how many do so from reading ‘the Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ or, come to that ‘A Line in the Sand’ ? Films are important, When they deviate from the truth it matters. And when the film is as good as ‘Argo’ it matters even more.

I Demand Female Dustpersons Now!

It’s plainly time to revive my campaign for more women on dustcarts, and on those huge, terrifying lorries that deliver and remove skips. Have you noticed that you never see female persons doing these jobs?  Likewise, when gangs turn up to dig holes in the road, you never see any women wielding pneumatic drills. And when was the last time you saw a woman driving a bulldozer? I mean to say, what have Britain’s feminists been doing about this major sex imbalance for so long?

 

Where are the trumpeting leading articles in ‘The Guardian’ on this failure of our society to adapt to the 21st century?  Where are the bitter interviews of garbage disposal chiefs (that coven of reactionary thought) and of whoever is in charge of road gangs? Why hasn’t the Prime Minister opined? Where, for that matter, has the BBC been? Let us brook no more delay! Let us have women driving dustcarts now! And delivering skips!  

 

 

Of course, we know the answer. Very few women are interested in doing such jobs, and most people would be surprised if they applied for them. But if there really is some sort of overriding moral principle which says that all jobs should be done equally by men and women, that shouldn’t matter. Special training schools should be set up now for female skip-deliverers, bin-emptiers and pneumatic drillers. Mr Slippery should speak out.

 

I don’t imagine anyone would object much (especially employers, who would be able to keep wages in that sector lower if their workers came from a wider pool).

 

 

But that isn’t really the point.

 

The campaigns to feminise various highly important and symbolic jobs are far more to do with annoying people who do have objections to this dogmatic equality, and with dethroning older ideas and conventions, than they are to do with female equality.

 

As someone who is a member of the Church of England (and incidentally couldn’t care two hoots about what sex a Minister or a Bishop is) ,  I laugh to hear BBC reporters getting excited about this subject. They know, of course, as a matter of immutable principle that it is wrong to deny anybody a post on the grounds of sex. But as secular people who’ve probably never entered a church and certainly wouldn’t worship in one, how can they really care about it? The poor things, for instance, have no idea even how to address or refer to the various grades of cleric in the Church of England.

 

They call vicars ‘Reverend Jones’  and address them as ‘Reverend’, which sounds illiterate and ignorant both to an Anglican and to a properly trained journalist.  

 

(Note for the curious:  a vicar is referred to as ‘The Rev(erend) Andrew/Angela Smith’ (Christian name required) the first time he or she is mentioned, and thereafter as ‘Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms Smith’. He or she can be addressed , according to how well you know him or her, and according to his religious opinions, as ‘Vicar’ , ‘Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss Smith  ‘, ‘Andrew’ or ‘Angela’ .Or he may prefer to be addressed as (and written about as) ‘Father Smith’ if he is a bit of an Anglo-Catholic, as quite a few male clergy are, but not many female clergy, as Anglo-Catholics in my experience don’t think women can be priests, or priests can be women –  so a ‘Mother Angela’ is about as unlikely as a ‘Father Angela’ – though don’t get me started on what used to go on at a certain Anglican Theological college where all the ordinands adopted female names).

 

 

Yet, knowing little of the subject,  all these Godless or indifferent outsiders have fervent opinions on the matter of mitres. In many cases, they have much stronger opinions than I do. As a Broad Church Protestant, I see no reason why a woman shouldn’t be what I call a minister (in my part of the Church, we have Ministers, not Priests, and tables rather than altars). But good friends of mine, both Anglo-Catholics and strong evangelicals, disagree. The Catholics think that the Mass doesn’t properly take place if it is celebrated by a woman, and argue from tradition – that Christ himself picked no women as apostles, and the priesthood derives from the apostles and can’t deviate from Christ’s example. Mrs Lindsay Newcombe, who is not some sort of religious doormat but has a doctorate in Mechanical Engineering and is married to an Anglican Priest, thinks like this. You can watch her here, explaining why she thinks what she thinks. http://www.4thought.tv/themes/is-organised-religion-sexist/lindsay-newcombe

 

 

If you believed that, and they do (though I don’t), then it seems to me that you’d be entitled to carry on behaving as if you did,  in the Church that has until very recently treated your ideas as both normal and predominant . As discussed here at length, religious faith goes beyond provable facts and reason, and seizes people by the heart as much as it enters their consciousness through the brain. I’m unmoved by relics and see the service of Holy Communion as a potent remembrance of the greatest event in the world’s history, but no more. But I have friends who feel differently, and I respect them for it.

 

Likewise I have evangelical friends, at the opposite end of the Anglican spectrum,  who believe that the Bible is quite firm on the idea that men and not women should lead the church. I won’t go into that, simply say that if you are to have a Church which pays any attention to the Bible at all, then people who have such views cannot rightfully be excluded from it, or shouldered brusquely aside by it. 

 

As far as I can make out, the argument in the ludicrously-named General Synod ( a body I would cheerfully dissolve tonight) has not for years been about whether there should be female Bishops. That was accepted long ago. The problem has been over *how those who could not in conscience accept the authority of such Bishops could be accommodated*.

 

The supporters of women bishops, had they been prepared to allow small separate jurisdictions for the Catholic and Evangelical dissenters, could long ago have got their majority and there would be women bishops by now. But ( as I found in a TV debate with some of them a few years ago) they regard such compromise restrictions as irksome and unacceptable. So the provisions for the dissenters, on offer on Tuesday, were rather vague. And as we all know, vague protections are subject to the iron whims of men and women who are charged with policing them, but do not respect them.

 

What seems to me to be going on here is a dogmatic march to total victory at all costs (the costs may well be substantial walk-outs by clergy and people). It crosses my mind that quite a lot of people making passionate statements on this matter (many of them not themselves Christians, let alone members of the C of E) want there to be women Bishops *precisely because they have noticed that the idea gives pain and grief to their opponents*.

 

It’s my view that many of the campaigns for the feminisation of various professions and institutions have had this aim – the humiliation and sidelining of conservatives - as their underlying purpose. I’ve discussed here and elsewhere, and at length, the bizarre campaign to feminise the Fire Brigades, the chief practical effect of which has been to open this job to weedy men who would once have been excluded because they weren’t strong or fit enough to a job requiring …strength and fitness.

 

The decision to send women to sea in warships, likewise, was driven by dogma and has caused immense problems of on-board discipline, recruitment and retention, which occasionally reveal themselves in lurid courts martial.

 

The conversion of the Police from a force which needed to use physical presence to achieve peace on the streets, into a bureaucratic crime-reporting and social work body has concealed the enormous effect of feminisation there. Some might suggest that this alteration in the nature of the police might have been one of the aims of those who abolished male-female distinctions in police work.

 

The Army and the Marines are still permitted to maintain firm barriers to women in combat, because at this point dogma clashes so fiercely with reality that dogma has to give way…for now.  But I can see a time when the forces of correctness will triumph over the needs of national defence.

 

In fact, I suspect we will have female Marines in this country before we have female dustpersons , pneumatic drillers or drivers of skip trucks. It just doesn’t annoy anyone enough to pursue equality in that sector.

Gaza, Islam, Peace and Concessions

A few points arising from comments over the weekend ( I shall of course be replying to Professor Millican at length in a separate posting).

 

Is there an Islamist threat to this country? I don’t know for sure. What shape would such a threat take? Is ‘threat’ even the right word? Presumably, the alteration of this country into one where Islamic ideas predominated, or played a very large role in our laws and culture,  might alarm many people, or seem undesirable to them.  Then again, can this be described as a ‘threat’?  This will be a matter of preference. Some people will very much desire it, for sincere reasons. Others most definitely will not.

 

Personally I would not wish this to happen. I have many disagreements with what appear to me to be Islamic practices and policies. Viewed simply as a political programme, without any thought given to its religious claims, Islam would seem to me to be less tolerant of disagreement, less sympathetic to the separation of powers, less pluralistic and considerably more patriarchal than Christianity, likewise viewed as a political programme.  I also think its attitude towards marriage is significantly different, and I much prefer the (Anglican) Christian approach to that subject.  I think these differences can be shown to exist, with reference to several existing societies where Islam, Sunni or Shia, is now established in authority.

 

 

What I am sure about is that, if there is such a threat, or promise as some might see it, or let’s describe it neutrally as a ‘possibility’, it comes from the growing numbers of Muslims now peacefully settled, living, and nurturing families in this country, far more than it does from the mythical ‘Al Qaeda’ .

 

Terrorist attacks are horrible, and grievous, but generally they cannot influence a strong-willed properly-led free society. It is only the modern habit of Western governments, of strengthening their own authority by claiming the ability to defend us against ‘terror’, or even to make wars upon it, that have fostered the illusion that terrorist acts are a major threat to Western civilisation, alongside the illusion that these can be reliably prevented or protected against by state action, new laws, surveillance etc.

 

I believe it is almost infinitesimally unlikely that I or any reader will be the victim of a terror attack (as unlikely, as I have said before, as that an eagle will kill me  by dropping a tortoise on my head from a great height). Likewise, I think it most unlikely that our various ridiculous and overblown security organs can do anything to stop it, any more than the vast array of silly ‘precautions’ against ‘terror’ which have made life so much less convenient, and officials so much more arrogant, in the last 30 years or so.

 

 

In truth, even an attack such as the 2001 outrages in New York did not derail the US economy, incapacitate the operation of the state and its laws or damage the military power of the USA. Certainly the deaths involved were harrowing and horrible, and the methods adopted by the killers hocking and disgusting in the extreme. But compared with the actions of both sides in the later stages of the Second World War, even this , the worst Terror atrocity of modern times, is in fact quite small. Terrorism ultimately is propaganda, not warfare. Modern states too often aid that propaganda by giving such acts a political status (exactly what they seek) , instead of simply treating them as the crimes they are.

 

One of the reasons why neo-conservatives are stuck with this question is that they are mostly North Americans who support free movement of peoples (through open borders) for simple economic reasons (neo-conservatives are economic and social liberals, ‘conservative’ only about waging war, if that is in fact conservative)  .They  fondly imagine that it is politically unimportant. They are wrong.  In North America, mass immigration has most certainly been driving a strong political, cultural and moral revolution, as those neo-conservatives are rapidly discovering at the polls.  But in the USA it is overwhelmingly Latin American. There is a small amount of Muslim migration to the USA (mostly in Michigan) and also into Canada via Quebec, where French-speaking North Africans have been encouraged to settle by the local government, anxious above all to keep the French language on top. But they have nothing like the Islamic migration into Western Europe, which is driving social change in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium , Italy and Germany.

 

This is already having a noticeable effect – and, while I haven’t yet read the book recommended to me on the subject, I’d point out that our establishment seems to have a strong desire to please Islam, in schools, in broadcasting, in the civil service, in foreign policy and in its general pursuit of multiculturalism and ‘equality and diversity’ which makes Christianity just one among many religions and robs it of its previous secure role as the established (if not widely practised) religion). For me it is the British state’s insistence on multiculturalism, rather than the migration itself, which has created this situation.

 

My guess is that, as the Muslim population grows, this process will continue more strongly. The moment at which we might have said ‘Yes, you are welcome but this is and remains a specifically Christian society’ seems to me to have passed. It will be very interesting to see how this is dealt with at the Coronation of our next monarch - which must inevitably come, sad as it is to contemplate the loss of our present Queen.

 

Likewise, the moment at which we could have limited the levels of migration has probably gone. It would now be politically far easier to leave things as they are than to place new limits of migration. This means that the current arrangement, under which more or less wholly Muslim communities now exist in several parts of the country, into which there is continued migration of young husbands and wives from these communities’ ancestral countries, will continue indefinitely. To some extent this will mean that these communities always remain at least partly first-generation.  

 

***********

 

I’m grateful for many of your comments about Gaza. I do once again urge people to read the original report, which also mentions one or two other aspects of the Israel problem. I’m struck, by the way, by Israel’s propagandist naming of its current military actions ‘Operation Pillar of Defence’. This is obviously a propaganda name, dreamed up by a politician. The previous attack, wrong-headed though it was, had a suitably incomprehensible military name, chosen because it gave precisely no clue to the nature of the action - ‘Operation Cast Lead’.

 

I’m asked about Israeli settlements, as they are called, on land captured in 1967.First of all, let us remember that this territory doesn’t really belong to any nation. The last recognised legal holder, under a League of Nations Mandate, was the British Empire. Jordan occupied it illegally in 1948. Israel occupied it illegally after 1967. In the original SanRemo accords(which put the Balfour Declaration into practice), all this territory was designated for ‘Close Jewish Settlement’, a position which as far as I know persisted until the collapse of the Mandate and the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.  If this is wrong, I’d be interested to hear. If that’s so, it’s rather hard to be rigid about the matter.

 

By contrast, all the land east of the Jordan, abruptly sliced off the Palestine Mandate and given to Abdullah by Winston Churchill (an episode brilliantly and rather hilariously described by Samuel Katz in his informative but propagandist book ‘Battleground’  and rather skirted round by more conventional historians) was originally designated for Jewish settlement, but then undesignated.  Jews are now actually forbidden to live there. To the extent that there ever was a political entity called ‘Palestine’, a great deal of it is already firmly in Arab hands. The quarrels have all been about what was left over after ‘TransJordan’ was created and recognised by the League 90 years ago.

 

What I suspect the Likud government intended by building the ‘settlements’ (in reality solid stone and concrete commuter towns with every appearance of permanence and frequently located on defensible hilltops) was de facto possession whenever a final settlement came to be made. In diplomacy as well as in other matters, possession is nine points of the law, and since the Potsdam Expulsions and the Indian expulsions of the 1940s, world leaders have been very unwilling to embark on any more ethnic cleansing. I might add that quite a few Christian Arabs have quietly packed up and left the Middle East, as a result of unpublicised, salami-slicing religious cleansing by Muslims, and nobody much has protested, least of all the Western Christian Church which tends to view the Arab Muslim cause in this region as worthy of uncritical support.

 

We will have to guess how far Likud might be prepared to go in withdrawing from any of these new towns. It certainly won’t quit all of them, or relax its grip on Jerusalem itself. The secret of Ariel Sharon’s views on this topic has been locked in his mind since he was felled by a stroke nearly seven years ago. Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza (opposed by the current premier, Bibi Netanyahu) made many wonder if he might not at some stage do something equally bold with parts of the West Bank .

 

It is interesting to speculate on whether Sharon, Israel’s canniest and most brutal politician, and in my view an undoubted war criminal, might have used the Israeli Army and police to force Israeli citizens out of some of their West Bank homes, what the world would have made of it,  whether his government could have survived it or even whether Israeli forces would have been prepared to force such a policy through. On the other hand it is hard to think of another figure in Israel who could actually have achieved any kind of withdrawal from the West Bank.

And yet, as I suggested in the original article, a practical  compromise between the 1948 borders and the 1967 borders is probably the only realistic basis of a workable peace, whether negotiated or (much more likely and practical in my view) unrecognised and de facto.

 

No such covert deal is possible if things go on as they are. For anyone who likes all the peoples of the region, and wishes them well in their lives, it is all rather sad. But the sarcastic person who suggested that I supported the view that Israel had to make all the concessions needs to realise that support for Israel does not necessarily require a slavish swallowing of all the propaganda that Israel sends out.  Everyone has made concessions for years, in many cases conceding their lives. If a lasting peace were available (and I’m not sure that it is) a concession or two would be worth making to get it. 

The Millican Brief

Once again I have interleaved my replies to Professor Millican with his original posting( which first appeared as an extended comment on ‘The Millican tendency’) I have marked my responses *** and set them in a different typeface from the one used for Professor Millican’s words.

 

Professor Millican began : ‘(a) You say that you are "uncomfortable with the idea that the choice which then follows [consideration of the evidence for and against God] is unconnected with reason". You go on to deny "that reason *dictates* the choice", suggesting however that "Reason leads us *to* the choice, and helps us to make it". This is a softening of what I took to be your view, and I would appreciate some clarification. Are you saying that choice comes in *only* when reason leaves a decision relatively finely balanced? Suppose I came to the conclusion on rational grounds that the existence of God was around twice as likely as not (or vice-versa) - would that still leave room for a choice? What if the judgement was 10-1, or 100-1, or 1000-1? (Obviously I appreciate that in most important decisions - including this one - the odds are nothing like so determinate, but I am just trying to get a feel for when you think choice comes in.)’

 

***Simply,  no. the Professor is making too much of this. I just don’t wish to be portrayed as the apostle of unreason. It is reason that tells us we cannot use reason to decide this matter. That is all. I have already said that I would continue to believe in God if there were only the tiniest scrap of evidence for his existence left. The odds against could be as long as he cares to set them.

 

 (b) You say "The question of the existence of God is uniquely important, because of the implications of the answer we give to it to the way in which we subsequently live and die." Again I'd welcome clarification: why wouldn't *any* question for which a positive answer leads to a profound change in how "we subsequently live and die" be just as important? Can't lots of religious and other commitments - e.g. to devote one's life to a political or charitable cause - have just as big an impact (and indeed in some cases a far bigger impact than theism has on the average churchgoer)?

 

***Once again, no. There is no comparable choice, whose effect extends into all eternity.  On the choice between living in a just and purposeful universe, and life in an accidental,  pointless chaos, all else in life and thought hinges, including charitable and political choices.

 

 

(c) I agree that in some questions a decision can be required without proof; indeed this is absolutely obvious, because so little of what we believe is literally *provable*.

 

****Good. That will save us a lot of time in future.

 

I'm also prepared to go further, and accept that sometimes a decision can be required without even good evidence to decide the issue (e.g. which door is more likely to provide a safe escape from a fire that's getting dangerous?). (d) You suggest that I am "a bit obtuse" in not understanding why you take the evidence for and against God to be more "subjective" than lots of other things - you then go on to give the usual gratuitous psychological hypothesis about my motivation (which I shall ignore).

 

**** It would be quite possible for someone to have established by investyigation which was the better door. On his motivation,  this is the one part of my argument that I most wish him not to ignore, and which he must by now have noticed that I most wish him not to ignore, and further, the one that I repeatedly accuse him and his allies of desiring to dodge.

 

Why is it ‘gratuitous’? Why is it ‘psychological’?  It is a statement of fact about the substantive, central difference between the religious and the non-religious view of the universe.  I have described the nature of the choice between a created, purposeful universe in which justice is inherent and life eternal, and one in which we are no more than a meaningless accident living in the midst of another meaningless accident, and in which our actions are of no significance beyond their immediate effect. Professor Millican, so far as I can recall, has never sought to dispute this description of the difference between the two positions. I’m not sure how he could, unless he holds to the new ‘third-way’ view tentatively embraced by at least one of our leading atheists, that we were in fact created by aliens, in which case, as they say I’m outta here.

 

No ‘psychology’ is necessary to divine why someone might choose what is, on the face of it, by far the less attractive of the two options, namely that our lives have no point, purpose or meaning, and that ‘what will survive of us’ is not love, but nothing. If someone doesn’t want justice for himself or anyone else, it really doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes, or Sigmund Freud,  to work out why.

 

It seems to me that nobody who thinks about this matter for any time at all can be in doubt of the implications of choosing one or the other. If Professor Millican has other motives for preferring meaningless chaos to purpose and justice, then I am only too willing to hear them. Anything ( well, almost anything)  to get him to discuss what is in fact at issue between us, but which he will not acknowledge.

 

 

The Professor continues : ‘Were you a philosopher, I think you would appreciate more readily that the God-hypothesis is far more susceptible of "objective" evidence than many other cosmological hypotheses, precisely because it is so extreme: God is supposed to be *infinitely* good, powerful, knowledgeable etc. This potentially enables conclusions to be drawn from His existence (thus providing a potential source of confirming or disconfirming evidence) in a way that would be impossible with vaguer or less extreme hypotheses (e.g. involving a pantheon of contrasting gods).’

 

***Even though I am definitely not a philosopher, I wouldn’t disagree with most of that.  There is indeed a great deal of evidence for God’s existence.  But it is not of the type which can be ‘confirmed’ or ‘disconfirmed’ (which I assume are synonyms for ‘proved’ and ‘disproved’). The ambition and extent of it don’t make it any easier to prove, and if they did, then Professor Millican would have spent a large portion of Sunday on his knees. But he didn’t. The fact that it’s blazingly obvious to me, doesn’t mean it’s equally obvious to him. I acknowledge this.

 

It is readily available to anyone who has decided to entertain the idea in the first place. And it is not available to anyone who has not. There is no mathematical or other formula by which evidence, at a certain point , turns into proof. Every bit of available evidence could point in the direction of God’s existence. There might well be no evidence at all for His non-existence (I’ve see none lately).  But to be proof it must pass the Millican test. I have to be able to show Professor Millican, presumably in front of independent witnesses, a piece of information which can be explained by the existence of God *and in no other way*. But he will always have another way, *because he wants to*.  And I, lacking total knowledge of the universe just as he lacks it, have no way of showing him that his ’other way’ is definitely false.

  

 

 

(e) I certainly don't think of the "beauty, complexity and intricacy of the universe" as evidence of "a capricious cosmic train crash, without meaning or significance, which might just as easily never have happened". Whether the whole shebang might just as easily never have happened I've no idea - but the evidence is that *we* at least are very lucky to be here, for all sorts of reasons (e.g. perhaps the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, the opening of the Rift Valley). But the evolutionary story - whether thought of as started off by God (through his "fine tuning" the universe accordingly) or not - is far from involving a "cosmic train crash".

 

***Oh, come on. This is a diversion. The proposition is quite simple. Either the Cosmos was designed and created by a rational force with intent (let’s call it ‘God’) or it just happened. If it wasn’t deliberate and planned, then it was an accident. Which does he believe? And (since we don’t and can’t know which is true) why does he believe what he believes?

 

 (f) Why you should call me a "dogmatic unbeliever" I don't know. I've certainly never claimed that my beliefs here are "demonstrable" - indeed I agree with Hume that questions of matter of fact are *never* demonstrable a priori.

 

***Then I will tell him. Because he begins his open engagement with the argument about God’s existence only *after*  he has already prescribed the outcome, by adopting from the start a purely materialist approach to the question. This precludes any serious consideration of the possibility of God. That’s why he can’t understand Theist ideas of what might constitute evidence of God’s existence. Perhaps, by concealing this important piece of the argument from us, and zooming away from any attempt to get him to explain it with loud cries of ‘gratuitous!’,  he also conceals it from himself. I suspect this is so. But if it walks like a dogma, and barks like a dogma, and is shaped like a dogma, I think it needs a dogma licence, and shall call it a dogma.  

 

The professor protests: ‘ Please stop putting claims into my mouth, especially silly ones!’

***There would be little point in my doing so, in a forum where he is able to rebut such attempts.  I just think this is true, and every stage of this discussion shows it to be. My proposition is simple, and the question it raises is even simpler. Neither the proposition nor the question can be made any less simple by him or his arguments, though it seems to me to have been his main aim to do this. Yet he finds endless ways of not dealing with it

 

(g) If you *really* got lost halfway through a perfectly straightforward argument consisting of three short sentences, then I wonder why you are putting yourself forward as any sort of reliable authority on difficult philosophical issues.

 

 

***Indeed. I grieve for my dimness in general and am not, so far as I know, putting myself forward as an authority on anything.  The Professor, as I have noted before, chose to visit my humble and unschooled blog to make his case. Perhaps it hasn’t turned out to be quite the cakewalk he had hoped for, as so many powerful invaders do when they venture into primitive territory.

 

 But I explained clearly why I got lost. The three sentences did not follow properly. Expertise ( as far as I can remember at the core of that exchange)  was not the quality in question.  I always thought that saying you were lost was a polite way of telling your opponent his argument was a mess. Perhaps I should be more direct in future.

 

 

The Professor complains :’That argument - as indeed you quote it - did not even mention God, so when you try to address it, why do you immediately bring Him into it?’

 

***Now here I am genuinely baffled. Is our whole discussion not about God and His existence or non-existence? Into what other matter were you proposing that we brought people with ‘special expertise’?

The Professor declares : ‘ I was simply arguing - quite generally - that "lack of precise 'objective' measurement is no obstacle to the application of rational judgement; nor to the recognition that some answers are better warranted than others". Exactly as I said. Do you agree, or not?

 

*** Yes, I agree, but it is of no interest in the question ‘Does God exist or not?’ in which there is no objectively proveable right answer. Here is the passage : ‘’Lots of things require judgements that cannot be precisely quantified, but in which nevertheless we recognise that some people have special expertise (usually gained over a long period of relevant experience). Indeed it is often precisely *because* the decisions are not reducible to objective measurement that we specially value expert judgement. Thus lack of precise "objective" measurement is no obstacle to the application of rational judgement; nor to the recognition that some answers are better warranted than others.’

 

And here is my reply :’ ***I got lost half way through this.  Where is ‘special expertise’ involved in the discussion of God’s existence?  Great Scientists and Great Philosophers, equipped either with superior knowledge or superior skills at thought  have over many centuries taken both sides in the quarrel. What sort of judgements are we talking about? In what way are they comparable to the choice between God and No God?  Surely we revere experts because they *know* more than we do, and understand that if we *knew* as much as they did, we would share their judgements.  But the currency of *knowledge*, essential among all experts from plumbers to brain surgeons, is not available in this discussion. There simply isn’t any knowledge. And we cannot even agree about what constitutes evidence.’

 

Seems reasonable to me . I thought( and think) that the introduction of ‘expertise’ into an argument about the unknowable is a category error.

 

 

The Professor again: ‘ (h) Some of what you say here seems to tend towards an extreme, radical subjectivism: in the case of God (and God alone?), "we cannot even agree about what constitutes evidence", perhaps to the extent that rational engagement between the two sides becomes impossible?

*** On this aspect of the matter, it is manifestly impossible.  I have said so from the start. My entire position is based upon this view. I am quite happy to have my belief in God described as ‘extreme, radical subjectivism’, provided the Professor doesn’t mind his unbelief being described in the same way. That is why I repeatedly seek to turn the discussion to the only interesting aspect , namely our motives in believing what we believe. As to why he repeatedly refuses to discuss this, readers will surely by now be drawing their own conclusions.

 

The Professor ’If you do take this view, then there is a tension with (a) above, where you say that reason *is* involved in leading us to a choice.

 

**I think a nit has just been picked. Our experience of reason, itself a form of reason, tells us that reason cannot resolve this question. Someone who can accurately read maps does not in general abandon his belief that maps are useful and necessary, when he finds himself in a place which is unmapped, but where he absolutely must make a choice between two routes at a fork in the road.  But his reason tells him that he cannot choose the route on the basis of a non-existent map. I see no tension at all, just an opponent avoiding a  frontal engagement because he doesn’t like the look of it.

 

The Professor :’ It also seems hard to square with the long history of deep engagement in debate by philosophers of religion on all sides.’

 

***Why is that? The professors, at all levels of genius, have not resolved it in thousands of years. No atheist has ever accepted , or been persuaded by, the ‘proofs’ offered by Mother Church.  And no theologian has ever been dashed by the ‘proofs’ of God’s non-existence offered by the cleverest of unbelievers. It seems remarkably easy to square my position with this historical fact.

 The professor continues :’And besides, it's actually quite common for disagreements on various topics to involve questioning of "what constitutes evidence" - in this respect the God question isn't as unusual as all that!’

 ***I’d need examples, but the atheist pre-exclusion of the possibility of the supernatural from the argument seems to me to be pretty unique.

 

The professor:  (i) You don't seem to have taken the point of the garden analogy, for which I refer you to (d) above. God is supposed to be not only good and powerful, but *infinitely* so. Hence we could reasonably expect any world He creates to be not just "good on the whole", but *manifestly* wonderful. Sadly, it isn't.’

***Really? I tried to point out that given God’s omniscience and our lack of it, the wonderfulness of many parts of Creation might be mysterious and impenetrable to us. It’s a basic Leibnitzian point, which I would have thought would be known to him.

 

The Professor:’ (j) I am extremely puzzled why you suggest that I am hung up on "proof" (as opposed to evidence). You ask the reader to note "that evidence rather than 'proof' is under discussion. We have evidence. But we do not have proof." Amen to all that, but I really don't think I was the one to bring the issue of "proof" into the discussion, was I?

 

***What does it matter who brought it in? It was and is the subject under discussion. I thought, in this passage : ‘Hence it is hard to combine your view that there is no rationally significant evidence for or against theism, with your view that it is vital to make a decision on the matter in line with what we apprehend to be theism's practical consequences.’ that he had substituted the word ‘evidence’ for ‘proof’ and that this was a bit naughty. I still do. Nothing to do with being ‘hung up’ Everything to do with using two different words interchangeably when it suits his argument to do so. Lots of people do it. It doesn’t work here, that’s all. 

The professor :’You were the one who claimed that because the existence of God - and His non-existence - are *unprovable*, belief was therefore a matter of choice. And I - throughout - have been challenging this on the ground that *zillions* of questions (e.g. the existence of Martians) are likewise *unprovable* either way, but cannot reasonably be inferred to be a matter of choice.’

 

***I have dealt with this rather silly diversion. I don't propose to return to it.

 

 If you had claimed instead that questions become a matter of choice when there is no *evidence* either way (a far more plausible claim, by the way), I would not have given Martians as a counter-example, because I think we have plenty of evidence against their existence. (k) I don't believe that I have *ever*, in our discussion, slipped "evidence" in as a synonym for "proof". The sentence in which you take me to be doing so means exactly what it says. I took your view to be "that there is no rationally significant evidence for or against theism", not merely that there is no *proof* either way (with the latter of which I would completely agree). I took the former view to be inferred by you from what seemed to be your acknowledged principles "that assent to God ... [lacks] sufficient evidence to determine a reasoned answer" because "the evidence for and against God is so 'subjective' and unmeasurable". Perhaps you can now clarify. We both agree that there is no *proof* either way - that's hardly news to anyone. But are you also denying that there is a rationally significant balance of evidence either way, such as might determine a reasonable person's belief (independently of his or her wishes)?

 

***Yes. I have always taken this position. What dis he think the passage from Job XXXVIII means, which I read to him in Oxford twelve days ago. Let me say it again. It is the whole purpose of my argument. We cannot know. We must choose. We choose on the basis of what we desire. We then find evidence which supports our choice. I have said all this quite clearly before. I am very interested that, thoughb I have said this so clearly, he has not understood it. This cannot possibly be because of a lack of ability or intelligence, for we know he has great reasoning powers and a fine mind. It must be ( as I have insisted from the start) a wilful barrier against an argument which brings us swiftly and directly to the awkward zone of desire.

 

 

 I took you to be doing so, but perhaps you are not after all? I would be grateful if you could keep your replies focused on these points of debate (just as I have focused closely on what you said in your last main posting). Sadly, life is very busy during the Oxford term, and time spent on this will be completely wasted if we keep having to go back over airy rhetoric and insulting psychological hypotheses about my motivation.

 

***Once again I should point out that this argument was of the Professor’s own choosing, not forced or pressed on  him in any way.  If he thinks he is wasting his time, then he must act accordingly.  This is a public forum into which he willingly entered, and he is just as free to leave it as he was to enter it. If he thinks it ‘insulting’ to be faced with the suggestion that his opinions may be influenced by his desires, then I can only say that I in my turn do not find it insulting at all, and freely acknowledge that this is the case with me. It is not in any way intended as a slight. I regard it as a simple statement of a rather obvious fact about us all. If I were of a sensitive cast of mind, I might choose to take umbrage at one or two of his sallies at me, but I regard that sort of thing as being in the way of business, and so to be laughed off    

Reflections on Gaza

Since the last time Israel got really angry about Gaza, I have visited the place itself (an account of this is to be be found here  http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/10/lattes-beach-barbecues-and-dodging-missiles-in-the-worlds-biggest-prison-camp.html

 

I find this helps me a little in deciding what to say now. My main feeling has always been that neither side is working for the interests of the people of Gaza. But I would add that the Israeli state has never really claimed that it did. The current government of Gaza, which presumably does claim to be working for the good of the people of that place, has rather more to be ashamed of.

 

The origins of the mess lie in the 1948 war, in which Israel established itself by right of conquest in the pre-1967 borders that the Arab world now loves so much, but loathed at the time. And, as we know, or ought to know the 1948 war originated in the British government’s duplicitous promise of the area to both Arabs and Jews. And that originated in the slow collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which Britain and France thought they could parcel out between them. In the end they were too weak to hold on to their conquests, all of which passed out of their control soon after World War Two.

 

And then alas ther region became involved in the Suez debacle of 1956, and was soon afterwards caught up in the global rivalry between the USA and the USSR, made still more complex by the West's hunger for Arab oil, and by the collapse of the Shah of Iran. None of this is very nice, and if we had all known in 1917 what was going to happen next, we might have come up with some better ideas. But of course we didn’t, and we have what we have and must deal with that. I should have thought the main aim of anyone involved would be to ensure that we did not make things any worse, or cause any more needless deaths , or human grief.

 

If you go to Gaza you can still, in places, just make out the remnants of the railway line which once linked Cairo and Jerusalem, going on northwards to Beirut, Aleppo and ultimately Istanbul - and from there across a short stretch of water to Europe. It is a dream journey, never likely to be possible in my lifetime (I once thought of writing a book about an imaginary railway journey from Jerusalem to Moscow, another politically impossible dream). The only passage from Gaza to Israel now is a rather alarmingly exposed slog on foot between the enormous and errily empty customs and passport sheds of Israel’s Erez crossing to the good-humoured if rather basic hutments of the Hamas border control. How it must gall the Hamas officials, each Islamically-bearded, to handle and accept passports bearing the stamps of the hated Zionist Entity. Many Arab Muslim states (not to mention Iran) would turn you away for that. But Gaza wants Western journalists to visit, and the other way in, through Egypt, is far harder for Westerners to use.

 

Oddly enough, there was another time when Gaza was technically independent. This was between 1948 and 1959, when there was something called the All-Palestine Government. Despite its grandiose name, this controlled only the Gaza strip (and was itself a puppet of the Egyptians). The vast bulk of the original Palestine Mandate was (as it is now) incorporated in the Kingdom of Jordan. That Kingdom had after 1948 annexed what is now the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Jordan and a large chunk of Jerusalem, including the Christian,  Jewish and Muslim Holy Places. Although the annexation seems to have had no basis in international law, it was recognised by Great Britain and Pakistan and not greatly protested against by the rest of the world.   People forget these things. What was left was in the hands of the State of Israel.  Anyway, the claim that there was any sort of Palestine government was abandoned by Gamel Abdel Nasser in 1959, when he placed it under Egyptian direct rule, in the form of a military governor. Again, I’m not quite sure what lawful right Egypt had to make this annexation, but there doesn’t seem to have been much fuss about it. Then Israel captured the Strip in 1967. Then it pulled out in 2005.

 

I am myself fascinated by this question of national title to land. How is it settled? How far can one go back to reopen the case? These days we tend to frown on conquest by force, but it was such conquest which fixed (for example) the current very odd borders of Poland (1945) and the even more fascinating Southern Frontier of the United States (1848), not to mention the boundaries of Denmark, Italy, and te enture title deeds of Australia and new Zealanmd, all very recent.

 

And of course it was the British defeat of Turkish arms (who would have thought that this great structure, sprawling across the centuries and half as old as time,  would be brought down by British Tommies and Woolwich artillery?). This was achieve din 1917 by Edmund Allenby, and it created the general parcelling out of territory into the states now known as Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon (modified slightly by Mustafa Kemal’s brilliant leadership of his nation, so converting the humiliating Treaty of Sevres (1920) into the much-less-humiliating Treaty of Lausanne(1923) ). Not to mention Saudi Arabia, another longer story for another time.

 

Quite how, out of all this seizure and gobbling, and counter-seizure, followed by yet more gobbling and counter-seizure, anyone can come up with clear statements that anyone’s settlement in such and such an area of Mandate Palestine is definitively ‘illegal’ rather beats me.  

 

Significantly, the refugees from the 1948 war were not allowed to settle freely where they chose in Egypt (or in any other Arab neighbour country), but were kept in cramped and squalid conditions in so called ‘camps’ (actually grimly permanent slums ), where their descendants remain. This seems to me slightly to contradict Arab propaganda in solidarity with, and in support of the displaced Arabs of the Palestine Mandate.  As I have pointed out before, the other victims of mass ethnic cleansing of the 1940s – the millions of non-Muslims who fled Pakistan for India or the millions of Muslims who hurried the other way, and the millions of Germans driven (with British connivance) out of central Europe –were long ago resettled and given citizenship of their new states. The curious will have to wonder why it is in the Holy Land and nowhere else that the descendants of refugees still live in cramped penury and misery as citizens of nowhere. I have my own theory, but I won’t force it on anyone.

 

I concentrate on these questions because it is these two features – the refugee crisis and the question of who owns the land – that lie beneath all the quarrels in this region.

 

Nobody really wants Gaza. Israel very foolishly tried to incorporate it after the war of 1967, when it had no real idea what it was doing. I am fairly sure that the 1967 borders were unworkable in central Israel, being more or less indefensible. And I think that the pre-1967 division of Jerusalem was unjust and enforced in a  disagreeably sectarian manner (limited access to Christian sites for Christians, no Jewish access to Jewish sites. The Israeli control of the Holy Places, though far from faultless, has I think been more generous than the Jordanian period). But the attempted Israeli takeover of the entire West Bank and Gaza  (remember that in 1967 Israel had also captured the Sinai) was unrealistic and wrong. No occupying power can remain popular, simply because it is an occupying power. And occupation weakens and corrupts the occupier.

 

The question is whether a permanent compromise between the 1948 and 1967 boundaries was ever possible. I suspect not. And one of the reasons for my suspicion is that Israel’s departure from Gaza in 2005, has not led to peace of any kind, but rather to the current futile and miserable war. It is a cliché, but do look at a map and see where the 1967 border ran. And then imagine how it would be if Israel withdrew from the West bank as it has from Gaza, and militant groups began to site missiles in the formerly occupied areas. Just look at what they could hit.

 

Often when I listen to the BBC reporting on Gaza,  I note turns of phrase in the reports which suggest that the reporter has forgotten, or never knew, that Israel left Gaza, bag and baggage, seven long years ago. I sometimes almost forget it myself, even though I have travelled the length of the Gaza Strip, from the Erez crossing to the tunnels at Rafah.

 

So why do Hamas launch rocket attacks into Israel? If they say it is because of Israel’s blockade, we should be sceptical because the blockade is not that stringent (see my article) , and also because a lot of people (many of them friendly to Hamas) make a lot of money out of the enormous amount of smuggling through tunnels which results from it.

 

And why does Israel react to these rockets with air attacks and talk of invasions? Of course it is tragic and appalling when an innocent person is killed in her home by one of these weapons, but it is equally tragic that innocents in Gaza die thanks to ‘collateral damage’ in Israeli attacks. I wonder if more effort could be spent on blocking or shooting down the often very crude rockets which are launched from Gaza.

 

And many more will, inevitably die in any Israeli ground assault, with its accompanying shelling. Could the approaching general election have anything to do with it? Could Hamas’s affiliation to Iran, and its dislike of the rival Fatah (now cohabiting rather well with Israel) have anything to do with it?

 

What would I know?

 

All I’m sure of is that the rentacrowd anti-Israeli protests are selective and disproportionate (Have the same people protested against Arab killing of Arabs on much larger scale, in several places? No. Why not? You work it out) . And also that another round of American-sponsored ‘peace’ talks will make things worse, because of their insistence on pursuing the Utopian ideal of a ‘final settlement’ when that is precisely what there will never be, and precisely what the leaders on both sides most fear to conclude, because such a settlement would certainly destroy them. I’m also sure that another Israeli invasion of Gaza will rebound on Israel in many ways, and will not in the end solve the problem( as I said last time they did it)

 

Left alone, the peoples of the area have proved rather good at creating a practical, unacknowledged sort of peace, under which the people of (say) Ramallah have recently begun to experience a far more abundant and settled life than they have known for many years, in fact since the last great push for ‘peace’ by Washington, which got us where we are now. This strikes me as a good thing. As an old acquaintance of mine, an Israeli Arab said to me when I was last in Jerusalem (I quote him in the Gaza article) ‘Oh, how I long for the good old days before we had peace’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dragging us into a futile war is a job for the political blowhards, General - not YOU

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

I hate to say it and he won’t be pleased by my endorsement, but Paddy Ashdown is right. Afghanistan is not worth the life of one more British soldier.

It has taken far too long, but at last a significant British political figure has told the truth. Just as happened in Canada, it will now not be long before everyone comes to the same conclusion.

And in a year or two they will all be pretending that they were against it all along.

But by then, unless we can stop it, the coffins will be coming back from Syria instead, and it is quite possible that – as in Helmand – most of the deaths will have been caused by the people who are supposedly on our side.

Just as we were bamboozled into supporting and continuing the futile Afghan intervention on spurious grounds, we are   about to be defrauded into a Syrian morass.

General Sir David Richards, grossly exceeding his constitutional role as Head of the Armed Forces, appeared on TV and said of Syria: ‘The humanitarian situation this winter I think will deteriorate and that may well provoke calls to intervene in a limited way . . . There’s no ultimately military reason why one shouldn’t and I know that all these options are, quite rightly, being examined.’

I thought it was the settled view in Britain that soldiers are told what to do by the Government, rather than the other  way round.

It’s not for him to say whether it is ‘quite right’ for such options to be examined. As it happens, if this war comes, most people will pretty quickly realise it was quite wrong. But the sad processions through RAF Brize Norton will by then have resumed, and various political blowhards, and their media tools, will be droning on about how we can’t leave now.

As readers of this column will know, the misery in Syria is the direct result of irresponsible, cynical, ignorant intervention in that formerly peaceful country by several Western powers.

We shall shortly be treated to waves of propaganda about the misery of the Syrian refugees shivering in camps in Turkey and Jordan. But it was Western encouragement of terrorist rebellion that turned them into refugees, and caused thousands of horrible deaths.

Those in politics and the media who urged on Syria’s Islamic fanatic rebels, can go round rattling tins for their  victims, and examining their consciences too. But the idea that the remains of the British Army should be despatched into one of the most complex and intractable ethnic, religious and political conflicts on the planet, or that it should even  be considered, is monstrous.  Sir David speaks of a ‘limited’ engagement.

Does this man know no history at all? All  the worst and most enduring entanglements begin as ‘limited’ interventions. Our troops will probably still be dying there 20 years from now, at the hands of the nasty zealots, no better than the Assad regime and quite possibly worse, whose cause we are for some strange reason supporting.

Now is the time to protest against this, before the BBC, which has shamefully abandoned impartiality on this issue, really gets going with the  refugee propaganda.

Children are a 'setback' to cherish, Lynne

We know, thanks to the stony feminist militant Patricia Hewitt, that New Labour viewed full-time mothers as a ‘problem’. But Ms Hewitt’s ideas have been adopted across the political spectrum.

The view that the raising of the next generation is an important, responsible, rewarding job, or that it could possibly be a proper task for a woman, is now so totally despised that it is heresy to utter it.

Listen to Minister Lynne Featherstone blurting out her thoughts on the matter.

Opining that having a baby is a ‘bit of a setback’, she muses: ‘One of the main barriers to full equality in the UK is the fact women still have babies.’

They do, the minxes. How much more convenient if babies could be made in nice computerised factories and raised impersonally by efficient nurseries for lives of drudgery relieved by shopping, so everyone could slave away in call-centres untroubled by feelings for their own children.

We need beat bobbies, not pointless polls

The Prime Minister and his Home Secretary have made Laurel and Hardy look serious, with their dimwit plan for elected police commissioners.

This was always a stunt and a gimmick. Mr Slippery and Mrs May would do anything rather than have a real return to proper, local police forces patrolling preventively on foot, which is the actual solution to many of our problems. But perhaps there will be a bonus. The derisory polling for these pointless panjandrums – in at least one polling station nobody voted at all – means chief constables will be

Why not extend this idea to politicians? Declare that any candidate who fails to win the support of (say) 25 per cent of the voters on the register will not be elected, even if he comes first. And then we might rule that any party that  cannot win 25 per cent of the national electorate cannot take office.

That would give voters the power to tell the existing parties we don’t want them any more, simply by abstaining.  As I’ve said many times before, the right not to vote is just as precious as the right to vote. Most of these people speak for nobody. Why should they be  in office? Stop voting for them.

The real Islamist threat  to Britain comes from  mass immigration and multiculturalism. Having encouraged large numbers of Muslims to come and live here, we now also officially urge them to stay separate from the rest of society, and apologise to them for our Christian traditions.

In the end, I fear this will lead to great trouble. But rather than try to tackle it, our leaders get into frothing frenzies about various bearded preachers, called Abu this or Abu that. This enables them to look ‘tough’ and to seem hostile to the Human Rights Court in Strasbourg – which they could pull out of tomorrow if they wanted to.

Is Abu Qatada Osama Bin Laden’s ‘right-hand man’? So many people have been given this dubious title that you could fill a church hall with them.

If so, I have two questions.

Why did the Tory Government (unencumbered by Nick Clegg as it then was) let him into Britain on a forged passport in 1993? And if he is so dangerous why don’t we prosecute him here? The whole thing’s a propaganda fraud. Ignore it.

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