Hen-pecked dads?

The Independent has now published an enthusiastic, and thoroughly sexist, review of my new car, the Subaru Legacy. Highlights:

The current über dad brand is Subaru, which makes chunky, reasonably priced and practical intercontinental ballistic missiles. Though they might look the epitome of sensible family motoring… Subaru make some of the fastest cars, point-to-point, in the world right now….

I plumped for the good, old-fashioned, four-door saloon – a car so wilfully nondescript [love that phrase] no wife could ever suspect that a fire-breathing rally car lurks beneath…. Drive one, though, and you are left in no doubt that this is an extremely capable sports saloon with immense traction and grip capable of hauling itself to 60 quicker than an Audi TT. I reckon it’s got the hen-pecked dad’s vote sewn up.

Of course the one that they tested was the 3 litre normally aspirated Legacy; mine is a GT with a 2.5L turbo. A quick look at Subaru UK‘s web site suggests that they don’t offer this model over there. (And as for the reviewer’s sexist views about car purchasing, I should note that my wife’s choice in the new car stakes was a BMW 325Xi – hardly a vote for moderation.)

Hegel's bluff

On a mailing list to which I subscribe*, an argument debate was developing about possible Supreme Court nominees. Nothing unusual about that; it happens everywhere. As on many other lists, the views of most of the participants were fairly predictable and a couple of the more vocal members were staking out their positions. Suddenly another occasional contributor to these food-fights chimed in with the immortal words, “Actually, I see you 2 as opposites sides of the same coin called ‘political extremism'”.

Now this pushed one of my buttons: the sloppy assumption that the right answer to any question must lie in the middle. Historically it’s a really dubious stance – how would one apply it to slavery, for instance, or voting rights? Intellectually it’s just plain lazy: a way of positioning oneself as moderate, and therefore right, without actually having to do any of the heavy lifting of working out a real argument.

Slacktivist wrote about this back in 2002 (and again recently):

The middle-path-between-extremes-must-be-right rationale is enormously appealing. But it’s helpful to state it more plainly as a logical argument:
1. Everyone thinks I’m wrong.
therefore
2. I am right.
It’s possible, of course, that statements 1 and 2 are both true, but the “therefore” does not follow. Let’s try a more charitable form of the argument:
1. People who are wrong think I’m wrong,
therefore
2. I am right.
Again, it could be true, but it doesn’t necessarily follow (and you haven’t, in fact, proven that the others are wrong). That magical “therefore” can be a convenient way of justifying your position without any sort of principled rationale.

Staking out a coherent, principled position is a lot of hard work. So is trying to understand and respond to the principles and arguments of your opponents. So why bother with all that?

Instead, just find someone seated to your right and label them “thesis.” Then turn to someone seated to your left and label them “antithesis.” Bingo! That makes you “synthesis” – the inevitable and uncontestable culmination of all right-thinking on the subject. Anyone who disagrees with you now is swept into the dustbin of history as a misguided extremist. All done simply without all that belabored appeal to argument, principle or fact.

I call this maneuver “Hegel’s bluff.”

The astute observer will spot this manoeuvre at work all over the place.

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* Names withheld, since nobody’s given me permission to drag this private debate into the blogosphere, and it would be unfair to assume that any statements were intended as carefully considered and defensible positions.

Biblical literalism, Constitutional "original intent": it's all the same thing

I was reading Slacktivist this evening and came across a piece that contained a simple idea that I had never thought about. (It seems so obvious now that I wonder if I’m the only one who hasn’t got it.) Put simply: religious conservatives and political conservatives are both obsessed with the primacy of authority over reason. Their sacred texts must never be subjected to reasoned interpretation, because then they cease to be magical tokens of authority.

Let me quote the author, Fred Clark:

At the FRC’s “Justice Sunday”… clergy and religious leaders… railed against any judge who dared speak of a “living Constitution”…

[they cited] a Supreme Court ruling barring the execution of the developmentally disabled. That decision was based, in part, on evolving community standards, and that idea — the evolution, or progress, or development of moral understanding — is what these religious leaders find dangerous and terrifying. From their perspective, community standards have been devolving ever since Mt. Sinai. The idea that the Constitution, or any revered text, might be read differently over time due to evolving community standards is the very idea these folks have been fighting against for the past century.

This is simply a continuation in a new arena of the fundamentalist/modernist controversy of the early 20th century. The fundamentalist “battle for the Bible” has escalated to include the battle over another sacred text: the U.S. Constitution. The terms of this battle are exactly the same. So too is the underlying motivation. It’s all about control. A “living Constitution” threatens that control as surely as the living word of the Bible.

A superficial reaction would be to assume that the fundamentalists of both types adopt this stance – authority instead of reason – because they are incapable of defending their positions rationally and reasonably.* A more nuanced view is that capability has nothing to do with it: conservatives are temperamentally drawn to arguments from authority. (This is perhaps the fundamental distinction between the conservative and liberal worldview, although many conservative intellectuals might disagree.) And finally a cynical view is that conservative leaders – intellectual, organizational – adopt this stance simply because it is a path to power, to command and control the mass of people. Demagogues have always known the power that comes from unshakable conviction coupled with unquestionable authority.

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* The last thing a Biblical fundamentalist wants is to be dragged into a debate about why Leviticus is authoritative about homosexuality but not shellfish, let alone slavery and mixed fibres.

Feel free to call me picky….

The latest release of Apple’s OS X, 10.4 (a.k.a. Tiger), includes a dictionary application as standard. Among its claims to fame are that it’s accessible as an application or a Dashboard widget, and that it’s integrated into the parental control system, so little Sandy or Chris can look up crap and find that it means “a losing throw of 2, 3, or 12 in [the game of] craps” and nothing else! Yeah, right. Meanwhile it completely fails my rough-and-ready test for being a usable dictionary: it contains neither quinquereme nor cerulescent. The latter is perhaps understandable (cerulean is certainly more common, and quite adequate), but ignoring the opening of Masefield’s wonderful “Cargoes” is completely inexcusable.

The Closed Circle

Following The Rotters’ Club, I’ve now finished Jonathan Coe’s The Closed Circle. Excellent. So many circles: of understanding, of relationship, of power. Circles to get trapped inside, impotently, and circles to carry you inexorably forward, like great wheels. [OK, that’s enough of that. – Ed.]

Anyway, it’s a wonderful two-part novel. Even though Coe includes a synopsis of The Rotter’s Club at the end of The Closed Circle (“just in case you’ve forgotten it”), the two books really have to be read as a single work. For those who bought the first book two or three years ago, the wait must have been unbearable….

What next? Based on Amazon.com reviews, I think I’ll try The Winshaw Legacy next. (Mind you, I’m supposed to be reading up on M&A practices and storage virtualization….)

Riverbend nails it as usual

The latest posting to Baghdad Burning about Bush’s recent speech is essential reading. Money quote – first Bush, then Riverbend:

“We continued our efforts to help them rebuild their country. Rebuilding a country after three decades of tyranny is hard and rebuilding while a country is at war is even harder.”

Three decades of tyranny isn’t what bombed and burned buildings to the ground. It isn’t three decades of tyranny that destroyed the infrastructure with such things as “Shock and Awe” and various other tactics. Though he fails to mention it, prior to the war, we didn’t have sewage overflowing in the streets like we do now, and water cut off for days and days at a time. We certainly had more than the 8 hours of electricity daily. In several areas they aren’t even getting that much.

Remember what Tip O’Neill said: All politics is local. Bush can blather on about 9/11 and freedom and terrorists and 9/11 and democracy and 9/11 and Bin Laden all he wants; to people in Iraq that don’t have fresh water or electricity to run the air conditioners when the temperature goes over 100F, it’s simple: “Fix this stuff or get the fuck out of our country and let us fix it!”.

On being swept away by a book

My son Chris and his wife Celeste are visiting, and yesterday evening we all went out to dinner at Lucy’s. After the meal, we walked across Coolidge Corner to the Brookline Booksmiths, our favourite local independent bookshop. I’m not sure why, but I picked up a new book by an author I didn’t recognize: The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe. Although it focusses on Blair’s Britain in the period 1999-2003, the story begins a generation before that: it follows the lives of the characters in Coe’s earlier The Rotters’ Club. That book was about a group of teenagers in Birmingham, growing up in the strange world of the 1970’s – Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, strikes, IRA bombings, platform shoes, punk, and so much more. OK, now I was hooked. Clutching The Closed Circle firmly, I headed to the back of the store to find a copy of The Rotters’ Club.

When we got home, I settled down to read The Rotters’ Club. As the San Francisco Chronicle reviewer put it: “A thrillingly traitorous work. It hums along for a hundred pages of wise comedy about teenage love’s mortifications, then cold cocks us with an honest surprise as cruel as it is earned.” And I was hooked. After the “surprise”, I put the book down, stunned, and went to bed. This morning I picked it up immediately after breakfast and read the next 300 pages without a break. It was one of those rare stories with which one has no choice in the matter; I felt as if I was being swept down a turbulent river, clinging onto a branch for support, and then finally being deposited on the bank, breathless. The last 32 pages are a stream of consciousness that is at once urgent and timeless.

Having finished, I did two things. First, I ordered an audio CD edition of the book for my mother in England; even though she is blind, I couldn’t let her escape this tour de force of a story. And I went out to buy the necessary supplies to prepare enough gin and tonic to fortify me for the next chapter in the lives of these characters….

Ten commandments that are worthy of respect

With all this blather about if and when it is proper to display the (Biblical) “10 Commandments” (but which version? there are so many), it’s worth remembering that the “Ten Commandments” which truly underpin our system of ethics, democracy, and law come from a very different source. The commandments in question are those of Solon the Athenian. He lived from 638 BCE to 558 BCE (approximately), and in 594 BCE he was chosen to draw up the first written civil constitution, something that no prophet or rabbi did. Solon is the founder of democracy as we know it, and his commandments have stood the test of time. They don’t include prescriptions that apply only to one small sect, nor do they include ideas (such as sabbath-keeping and proscribing graven images) which few acknowledge and vanishingly few actually pay any attention to. The only reference to religion is the good advice to be appropriately respectful of everybody’s deities:

  1. Trust good character more than promises.
  2. Do not speak falsely.
  3. Do good things.
  4. Do not be hasty in making friends, but do not abandon them once made.
  5. Learn to obey before you command.
  6. When giving advice, do not recommend what is most pleasing, but what is most useful.
  7. Make reason your supreme commander.
  8. Do not associate with people who do bad things.
  9. Honor the gods.
  10. Have regard for your parents.

See Richard Carrier’s The Real Ten Commandments for the whole story – including Solon’s claim to fame as the author of the RKBA! If any set of ancient commandments deserve a place in our courtrooms, it is those of Solon.