The Nation published an essay by Nicholas von Hoffman called A Devil’s Dictionary of Business which seems to be based on his book by the same name.
The original Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce is a classic of political satire. It is in the public domain and can be downloaded at Project Gutenberg. Bierce was cynical and skeptical, and he made few friends when he stripped away pretensions and popped the ballooned egos of the comfortable and the powerful.
I mentioned John Ralston Saul’s Doubter’s Companion in an entry in July. It fits into the tradition of satirical dictionaries.
Category: Liege & Lief
Essay on Anti-Semitism
This essay – The Anti-Semitic Disease – by historian Paul Johnson, published in Commentary is certainly interesting. It has some good information about the history of anti-semitism in the West and in the Arab World, but it takes an odd spin.
Law and Literary Criticism
An essay – Gone Fishing – by Scott McLemee appeared in the online version of Inside Higher Education last week. The title plays on the name and status of Stanley Fish, celebrity public intellectual.
The essay and the Wikipedia entry both mention Fish’s ideas about reader-response theory and the interpretive community, and the ambiguity of Fish’s relationship to literary and social theories of deconstruction.
Some of Fish’s ideas are almost self-evidently true. Literary works are complex sets of words organized to communicate meaning through complex symbols. A literary text contains a narrative description of real or realistic events as imagined by the writer, presenting meaning within a story of people in conflict, the imagined psychology of the characters, and layers of imagery and metaphor. The reader’s response to the story depends on the reader’s way of unpacking the story. Readers will differ with one another and with the writer over the meaning of words and events, partly because language is a cultural endeavor, inherently imprecise across place and time.
Fish’s suggestion that judges, or judges and lawyers are a privileged community seems to describe part of the legal process very well. The law of a place or a people is made up of words pronounced by authoritative persons – rulemakers accepted within the prevailing culture as sovereign authorities. Lawyers and judges spend a great deal of time and energy quarrelling about the words used in Constitutions, statutes, contracts and judicial opinions, in a theoretical effort to reach a principled, rational understanding. In common practice actual cases are decided by the instinctive or intuitive sense of justice of the judges hearing the case, as conditioned by the values of their interpretive community.
Back to the Cuckoo’s Nest
Theodore Dalrymple’s essay In the Asylum in the summer 2005 issue of City Journal is worth reading. It caught my attention because I have spent a fair amount of time on law and social policy around mental health. Dalrymple was a forensic psychiatrist, and his essay demonstates the professional frustration of the medical psychiatry with human rights laws that restrict that profession’s ability to intervene. He discusses one incident where he obviously thought it best, on behalf of prison authorities, to sedate and treat a psychotic inmate.
His essay is informative but polemical. In Canada, the law permits intervention to treat a patient who lacks capacity to make informed decisions. The focus is on the patient’s capacity, and not on whether the patient’s decisions correspond to a psychiatrist’s assessment of what is a patient’s best interests. For the curious, a link to the 2003 judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada in Starson v. Swayze.
His dissection of the ideas of R.D. Laing and Michel Foucault is adept. I agree with his criticisms of R.D. Laing, whose views were naive, romantic, unscientific and unrealistic. I agree with some his criticisms of Foucault, but I think he has largely failed to deal with the substance of Foucault’s argument. He tries to undermine Foucault with ad hominem arguments – bashing him as gay French intellectual doesn’t help to identify or answer Foucault’s critique of therapeutic justice. Foucault made sound points about the loss of dignity inherent in an institutional life and power struggles between patients and care givers. Foucault pointed out that the rhetoric of helping patients obscures the fact that society intervenes to protect itself, and that human dignity is sacrificed in the quest to make the mentally ill safely invisible.
Van Gogh Murder News
An update on the stories mentioned in my entry on Pluralism, Dutch Style.
The Dutch Courts have convicted the murderer of Theo Van Gogh. The BBC reported that Mohammed Bouyeri, who has joint Dutch-Moroccan nationality, was convicted of murder. Another BBC report on the public reactions to the case in Holland mentioned that he is going to be charged with terrorist conspiracy offences.
There are difficult aspects to this story. Bouyeri was a disaffected immigrant youth, apparently involved with drug use and street crime. He found new values in fundamentalist Islam, which made helped him live within a strict moral code, connected him to his cultural roots, and gave him a supportive community. It also indoctrinated him in an ideology of moral and cultural superiority and empowered him to become a terrorist and a murderer.
The Doubter’s Companion
The Doubter’s Companion (1994, ISBN 0-670-85536-7) followed Voltaire’s Bastards in Canadian writer John Ralston Saul‘s books on modern economics, politics and culture. His Wikipedia entry identifies him as a philosopher. I see him as a public intellectual and a social critic. His academic background appears to have been in economics. His arguments blend careful analysis with colourful and forceful presentation.
This book is subtitled “a dictionary of aggressive common sense”, which plays out as an alphabetically organized collection of essays running from a few lines to a few pages. His essays explore concerns that are discussed in more detail in several of his other books.
Pluralism, Dutch-Style
Last Sunday (June 26) I was listening to CBC One’s Sunday morning (radio) show, and I heard the lovely sound of Dutch accents, the accents of my stubborn parents, who shaped my contrarian tendencies. The Dutch accents belonged to interviewees in a documentary about the social conflicts that propelled the murderers of politician Pim Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. There was more about Van Gogh, less about Fortuyn. Both had been critical of the way that immigrant communities – specifically immigrants from Morocco and Turkey – were relating to Dutch society. Neither was a conventional white European racist. Both were modernists, opposed to immigrants on secular questions. While Fortuyn is often described as a right-wing populist, he was a libertarian and his conflicts with Muslim immigrants were initially personal. He was gay, and he criticized the homophobia of the Moroccan imam Khalil el-Moumni. Van Gogh was a friend and supporter of Fortuyn, as well as the immigrant feminist politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Both questioned the cultural values of Muslim fundamentalists, and Dutch immigration and social policy. Their central argument was that fundamentalists were exploiting Dutch tolerance to create a hostile and intolerant subculture.
Nature-Worship or Science?
There is a review of Jared Diamond’s book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive” in the London Review of Books. The reviewer, Partha Dasgupta, is an economist. The review is titled “Bottlenecks”. It’s a long review, with an overview of the book. The book has been praised in reviews and on the web by deep ecologists, Greens, Gaians, and the other usual suspects. Professor Dasgupta isn’t singing in that chorus. He is impressed with Diamond’s research and the analysis, up to a point.
Retail Wages
Here’s an article in Christianity Today on living wages and Wal-Mart called “Deliver us from Wal-Mart“. This article takes a liberal Christian look at a social and ethical issue.
Orthodoxy
On Saturday May 14, 2005, about 100 people arrived outside Calvary Temple, an independent pentecostal church in downtown Winnipeg, to protest against a conference being held held in the church – about 400 people were expected – led by representatives of Focus on the Family. The newspaper story wasn’t clear on it, but it was a “Love Won Out” seminar. The conference animator was quoted as saying that Focus on the Family does not believe in trying to convert gays, accepts gays, but opposes gay marriage and wants to help gay people who want to walk away from the gay lifestyle. Which is not quite a denial of promoting the useless de-gay “therapies” that gay people have identified as harmful and repressive. The protesters wanted to expose what they see as the homophobic agenda of the socially conservative Christian churches, but they said they were defending freedom.
The protest was visible but peaceful, and the conference was private and peaceful. The protesters were against “homophobia” and in favour of same-sex marriage. The picture with the story showed a few of the protesters and heir hand-lettered signs, attacking Christianity (and Islam) for being repressive of sexual freedom in general and the sexual freedom of homosexuals. Staging protests outside churches and challenging right wing Christians to accept the rights of gays and lesbians is probably not useful way of changing right wing Christians. The protest was intended to shock – as the French saying has it, to épater le bourgeios. The act of shocking conventional values implies that the shocker is not only alienated from those values, but has superior values which must be taught by confrontation. The protesters were signalling that they have superior values.
There is an anti-religious sense to the idea of sexual liberation. The advocates of sexual liberation accuse Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and other practitioners of traditional religion of being intolerant and repressive. What is true is that some people disagree with other people’s moral, social, political and religious values. The rhetoric of modern liberalism is that liberal values are more enlightened, progressive, highly evolved. The modern radical is comfortably smug in accusing other people with different values of being comfortable, smug and conventional, which motivates the radical to challenge those values. The intellectual and emotional core of this kind of protest is the Romantic belief that religious beliefs repress people from finding their true sexually liberated selves while they are under the influence of a church. This protest was an act of aggression against Christians, to silence their dissenting views when they disagree with an ideology of secular liberation.
A United Church of Canada Minister (evidently a liberal member of a liberal protestant denomination) who was among the protesters – was quoted as saying “People have a right to their values and their viewpoints but when those values and viewpoints hurt other people, they need to be challenged.” She calls on a principle of social behaviour – no one can talk about other people’s social behaviour if the discussion hurts their feelings. That reasoning inverts the logic of pluralism. She is not claiming tolerance or freedom from discrimination for homosexuals. She is claiming the right to confront Christians in their churches and to challenge their morality. The more specific argument is that the gay rights community says that disagreeing with it about its ideas about gender and sexual orientation is “homophobia”, which is as bad as positive discrimination against their rights.
The protesters implied that homophobia is a psychological problem. The gay rights community is mobilized around the idea of fighting homophobia, and its members are easily motivated to get out and protest or march on that issue. It gives their community direction and cohesion. It gives them a chance to reinforce their beliefs collectively and to talk to the public about their beliefs through the media. The gay rights community has good reasons to view itself as embattled and threatened, to work to entrench its legal rights and to try to secure a less fragile standing in society than uneasy or contemptuous tolerance. Calling Christians repressed or accusing them of trying to harm gays and lesbians is conducive to respecful engagement.