Geoff Arnold

Sassoon's "Statement Against The Continuation Of The War - July 1917"

My colleague Richard just posted a piece reminding us of Siegfried Sassoon's powerful protest against the exploitation of the honour and duty of soldiers by the ignorant and cynical. He also links to a fascinating CD by David Behrman based on correspondence between his father and Sassoon. I've just ordered the CD; I'll review it when it arrives.

On standing up against those who oppose reason

More and more ordinary people - not pundits, columnists or politicians - are speaking up in defence of the values of the Enlightenment. This time it's Adam Bosworth: "It is time to say that facts are what matter, not faith, that human progress is accomplished through unfettered use of reason and inquiry and tolerance and discussion and debate, not through intolerant and irrational acts of terror or edicts."

(Via Loosely Coupled.)

Alexander Hamilton on Harriet Miers

Andrew Sullivan has dug up a wonderful passage by Alexander Hamilton from the Federalist Papers (no.76). Hamilton's subject: the role of the Senate in confirming Presidential appointments:

"To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity."

Read the whole thing. As Sully points out, "Someone who needs a 'crash course' on constitutional law should not be selected to be a Supreme Court Justice".

How It Works...The Computer

Someone has scanned in all the pages of the 1971 and 1979 editions of the Ladybird book How It Works...The Computer. This is wonderful stuff. I remember using the 1971 edition to explain to relatives (elderly, young, and just plain confused) what it was that I did for a living; I also bought the 1979 edition for my son, Chris, who was five at the time (and a voracious reader). Both pictures and text are priceless.

(Via Boing-Boing.)

Selective quotation

As I was finishing up my last blog entry, I decided to link the final word to Pastor Niemöller's famous "First they came..." quotation. And I stumbled across a page on Niemöller at Liverpool Community College which not only gives the quotation but points out the revealing way in which people have misquoted it over the years - not just casually, but in speeches, and even in memorial inscriptions.

Everbody loves to quote Martin Niemöller’s lines about moral failure in the face of the Holocaust: 'First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left to stand up for me.'

But interestingly, people use the quotation to imply different meanings – even altering it to suit their purpose. When Time magazine used the quotation, they moved the Jews to the first place and dropped both the communists and the social democrats. American Vice-President Al Gore likes to quote the lines, but drops the trade unionists for good measure. Gore and Time also added Roman Catholics, who weren't on Niemöller's list at all. In the heavily Catholic city of Boston, Catholics were added to the quotation inscribed on its Holocaust memorial. The US Holocaust Museum drops the Communists but not the Social Democrats; other versions have added homosexuals.

What could make Niemöller's point more eloquently than this selectivity? UPDATE Wikipedia gives the original German text and some of the variations.

Getting a sense of perspective

In his weekly opinion piece for the BBC, the British political commentator (and ex-Labour MP) Brian Walden wrote: "Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, wrote something recently that chilled me to the bone. Sir Martin is the winner of the Michael Faraday Prize awarded annually by the Royal Society for excellence in communicating scientific ideas in lay terms. In my case he did almost too good a job. He pointed out that though the idea of evolution is well-known, the vast potential for further evolution isn't yet part of our common culture. He then gave an example. He said: 'It will not be humans who witness the demise of the Sun six billion years hence; it will be entities as different from us as we are from bacteria.'"

Now, why should this chill someone to the bone? After all, we've known for about a century that humans have only been around for a tiny fraction of the lifetime of this planet, let alone the universe. Furthermore the extrapolation of this pattern to the future is not scientifically hard. There's no reason to believe that evolution stopped once homo sapiens arrived on the scene.

But then Walden brings in religion. "A growing number of people believe that we need a fresh dialogue between science and religion. I mean religion in its widest sense - a belief in the value of human life. [Don't use those code-words, Brian.] Apparently the direction of scientific progress means that we have to make moral judgements about what's permissible and what isn't. We need a moral consensus. Most emphatically, I don't mean that we need to create a sort of blancmange morality that wobbles about, containing a bit of God, a bit of physics, a dash of Catholicism plus a smattering of Buddhism and a few sprigs of well-meaning atheism. That kind of ethical coalition wouldn't survive, and we need something that will. What we all need is to acknowledge our interdependency."

I'm all for a robust debate about ethics, for creating a coalition that will survive. But I'm not sure that religion as we presently understand it is capable of adapting to this role. We've just gone through a series of religious holidays in which everybody - bloggers, magazine editors, broadcasters, politicians - seem fixated on a handful of people, events, places, and ideas from a brief period of time, roughly 2500 to 1500 years ago. It's going to be hard to open your mind to the future if you insist that some historical events are uniquely privileged. Forget about six billion years: a hundred thousand years from now, nobody will remember, or care about, any of those ideas.

If Walden wants to talk about "religion in its widest sense", I suspect most of his opposition will come from those who espouse religion in the narrowest and most retrograde sense. Perhaps we need a new label. Humanism? In the meantime, he might want to contemplate the role that religion's historically narrow perspective may have played in creating an intellectual climate in which cosmology "chills him to the bone."

Thought for the day: "When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions: that is the heart of science." - Carl Sagan, Cosmos

If you want to be an historian...

In Salon today, Charles Taylor reviews Deborah Lipstadt's new book History on Trial, her account of the libel case brought against her by the Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer David Irving. Taylor is particularly interested in the way that some historians continued to support Irving even after his fraud and mendacity had been laid bare for all to see. Money quote:

What seems to bother Irving's defenders is the very notion of professional and intellectual accountability. Running into Lipstadt after the trial, [British historian, Donald Cameron Watt] said to her, 'None of us could have withstood that kind of scrutiny.' In a column for the Evening Standard, he said, 'Show me one historian who has not broken out into a cold sweat at the thought of undergoing similar treatment.' What Lipstadt was perhaps too polite to say to Watt was that any historian who wishes to be worthy of the title had damn well better be able to withstand that kind of scrutiny.

Armistice

Terry wrote: ""On the 11th hour, of the 11th day of the year 1918 all fighting shall cease on the Western Front"

And so came the Armistice. The peace of the world was to follow. It had been a war, to end all wars.

But it wasn't."

(From Better Than Salt Money.)