Hollow victories and glorious defeats
The Olympics are not really about sport. What makes us engage with them is something deeper. The London Games have reached through our television sets to bond us emotionally with individuals engaged in a succession of small struggles which speak to something much more universal about what it means to be human.
The past two weeks have told the stories of men and women wrestling in an arena bounded by triumph and failure, elation and pain, euphoria and disappointment. They are our modern myths which show the human spirit is truest under pressure, win or lose.
There was something awe-inspiring about the effortless elegance of the modest Kenyan 800m runner David Rudisha, who became the first person to break a world record on the Olympic Stadium track. And there is a magnificence about the exuberant arrogance of the double-gold sprinter Usain Bolt who capped his double-gold 100m and 200m runs with the words: “I’m now a legend. I am the greatest athlete to live”. “Winning is an amazing feeling at the Olympics,” said the US water-polo silver medallist Tim Hutten. “It makes you feel powerful and untouchable”.
But for all the gold medals it has been the losers who have taught us most. read more…
FollowWhy honour killings may yet rise, not fall
The conventional view of honour killing, underscored by the murder of Shafilea Ahmed – a Warrington schoolgirl who had become “too westernised” and refused to participate in a forced marriage in Pakistan– is that it is about two clashing cultures. And ours, dominated by post-Enlightenment notions of individual freedom and human rights, is correct, while theirs draws on a long-outmoded primitive tribalism which is self-evidently wrong. The only reason the police have not stamped down more ruthlessly is because of a fear of cultural insensitivity.
There are certainly two poles of thought here, and we are torn between them. On the one hand there has been, since the 1960s, a resistance to what was then called cultural imperialism. It overturned the old assumption that assimilation was the best policy. It saw value in diversity and was wary of racist assumptions about the superiority of one culture over another. The danger of such multiculturalism was clear in the lack of consistent liaison between school, social services, housing and police over the years Shafilea Ahmed was a victim of violence at the hands of her parents.
The other pole is that there are, despite our public authorities’ political correctness, absolute values which even in our relativist world have to be upheld. Not being allowed to kill your children is one of them.
Part of the problem is that the reality on the ground is less clear-cut. Arranged marriages are fine, politicians proclaim, but forced marriages – from which many honour killings spring – are not. But the grey areas of family relationships, filial respect and obedience, and emotional and psychological blackmail by parents, mean there is no clean line between arranged and forced. Government has sent an important signal by creating Forced Marriage Protection Orders in 2008 but they are very blunt instruments for a very subtle problem.
Gore Vidal inherited a tradition of oxymorons for the oxymoronic
People don’t like a smartarse, it is said. But they seem to have been prepared to make an exception for Gore Vidal. His death has been greeted with fulsome tributes and copious quotation from a lifetime of waspish wisecracks. My favourite came when Norman Mailer head-butted him in a tv studio because Vidal had likened his fellow writer to the cult killer Charles Manson. Without blinking, Vidal retorted: “Mailer, as usual, lost for words”.
Perhaps we have a greater tolerance for professional smartarses, which is why on this side of the pond Stephen Fry is so admired. He does smartarse plus irony, though there was much internet glee a few years back after he told his QI audience about the first time a duck-billed platypus was revealed to the world. The beast was dead and stuffed, leading many to suppose the creature had been invented from two different species by an over-imaginative animal-mounter. In the process the orotund presenter mispronounced the word taxidermist. (Apparently he should have said tax-idermist but said taxi-dermist, as the rest of us do). Oh what delight, for the schadenfreuders to see a clever-dick pedant tumble.
We British are suspicious of anyone who is seen as too clever by half, or by three-quarters as someone once said of that great polymath Jonathan Miller – who, when asked about his ethno-religious origins, once replied “I’m not really a Jew, just Jew-ish.” That is waggish rather than waspish, though the latter has been a unifying trait in modern wits from Oscar Wilde on through W S Gilbert, Ambrose Bierce, HL Mencken, Dorothy Parker, and Groucho Marx to Vidal himself. The aim has been simultaneously to irritate, illuminate and amuse, preferably with some exquisitely-phrased puckish celebration of the sheer deliciousness of the English language.
The riots – one year on – why they are unlikely to be repeated in the same way
It is easy to forget, amid all the innocent euphoria induced by the London Olympics, just how different was the public mood a year ago when riots overtook the streets of England. For five long hot days and nights police were overwhelmed. Disorder spread across the UK, from London to Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Salford, Nottingham,Bristol, Leeds and even to quiet towns like Gloucester. Five people died, 4,000 were arrested and shops, flats and businesses were destroyed. More than £200m worth of damage was done in one of the biggest outbreaks of civil unrest for generations.
This weekend marks the first anniversary of the incident which initially sparked the rioting when the Metropolitan Police shot dead an unarmed black man they claimed was a gangster involved in a shoot-out with its officers. It is a salutary moment to consider whether unrest on that scale could happen again.
Certainly the intervening twelve months have brought no satisfactory answers to the many questions which surrounded the death of Mark Duggan and which prompted his family to claim the police were pursuing a ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ policy that first brought protestors onto the streets.
No police officer has been charged with any offence arising out of the fatal shooting. An inquiry by the Independent Police Complaints Commission is proceeding so slowly that the coroner conducting Mr Duggan’s inquest has angrily denounced the police watchdog for refusing to hand over evidence it has gathered and threatened to bring contempt of court proceedings against it. Even Scotland Yard has condemned its tardiness and the Duggan family have called for the IPCC to be abolished for institutional bias. None of this does anything for public confidence in the police or their regulatory authorities.
Gloomier commentators predict that riots could reoccur, pointing out that many of the underlying factors which created the conditions for last year’s angry unrest remain in place. An official Government panel of inquiry blamed a range of factors including a chronic shortage of jobs for young people, poor parenting, a failure of the justice system to rehabilitate offenders, consumer materialism and youthful hostility towards the police.
How our best artists save the Catholic Imagination from our worst archbishops
After the almost universal acclaim for the opening ceremony of the London Olympics I was bemused to find a little group of dissidents on the internet bemoaning the fact that it had failed to acknowledge the Christian heritage of these isles. It had seemed to me to be shot through with a profoundly religious vision of which the two hymns – three if you count Jerusalem – were only the explicit salients in a ritual that was almost liturgical with its invocations, reflective silence and powerful symbolic use of fire, darkness and light, and the angelic dove-man rising slowly to heaven.
So I was not surprised to hear the next day that the writer behind the ceremony was Frank Cottrell Boyce, a man who has made a career of articulating his Roman Catholic faith in ways which are deeply imaginative and often unexpected. On the Today programme next morning there was a breadth and warmth to his vision which brought to mind the old penny catechism definition of a sacrament as “an outward sign of inward grace”.
The ceremony’s director, the filmmaker Danny Boyle, who was brought up in the same tradition, had said in his introduction to the Olympic brochure: “We can build Jerusalem, and it will be for everyone.” Of that Frank Cottrell Boyce added: “He’ll hate me for saying this but he has a very Catholic sense that yes, this is a fallen world, but you can find grace and beauty in its darkest corners.”
The American sociologist and priest Andrew Greeley has written of what how what he calls the Catholic Imagination sees God disclosed in and through creation without needing to making the divine explicit. It is why sacramentality and the mystical are such an important part of Catholic tradition. The dialectic Protestant mindset, by contrast, wants straighter lines made from the crooked timber of humanity and leans more to transcendence than to immanence.
Aung San Suu Kyi and Martin McGuinness – not such an odd couple
We were never told what David and Samantha Cameron gave Aung San Suu Kyi for lunch at Chequers. But we do know what the Queen was offered the day she famously shook hands with the former IRA leader Martin McGuinness. The traditional Irish menu concluded with a sweet honeycomb toffee known inIrelandas yellow man.
It was bold of McGuinness to have allowed that. Yellow Man is the kind of abusive nickname with which he might be labelled by the three hardline dissident Republican groups who on Friday announced that they were merging to reform the IRA. It was a clear attempt to undermine the power-sharing government in which McGuinness – once known as The Butcher of the Bogside – has become deputy First Minister. This new IRA criticised the Good Friday peace agreement negotiated by McGuinness and the Sinn Féin leadership saying “the Irish people have been sold a phoney peace, rubber-stamped by a token legislature in Stormont”. Such are the perils of Sinn Féin’s retreat from the purity of armed struggle into the messy reality of day-to-day politics.
Something similar is happening now to Aung San Suu Kyi, the woman who became a global symbol of human rights through almost a quarter of a century of imprisonment and isolation as the stubborn standard-bearer for the values of democracy against the military dictatorship of her nativeBurma. The high expectations her heroism created among some supporters now seem unsustainable as she makes the transition, aged 67, from long-term political prisoner to an agent of change inBurma’s embryonic reform process.
Suu Kyi is facing a backlash from fellow campaigners dismayed at her silence over the plight of the 800,000 Rohingya people whom the United Nations describe as one of the world’s most persecuted minorities. In her first parliamentary speech last week she called for laws to protect the rights of her nation’s ethnic minorities. But many previous supporters, including Human Rights Watch, criticised her for not mentioning the Rohingya by name.
Being locked up in house arrest, or locked into the certainties of armed struggle, was in a perverse way easier for Sui Ki and McGuinness alike. Principled opposition is a lot less complicated than mainstream politics. But the latter is no less risky. read more…
Are there really no answers to the Batman questions?
These are questions to which there are no answers said the Mayor of Aurora, Steve Hogan, after a 24-year-old neuroscience PhD student set off a smoke bomb inside a midnight showing of the new Batman movie film and began systematically shooting customers as they fled from the cinema.
In one sense, there are plenty of answers to the questions which such a horror prompts. It is just that many people prefer not to ask them. Wouldn’t gun control laws be a partial solution? Deranged individuals will always be with us but a madman with a gun can – and in America repeatedly does – do much more damage than a madman without one. The idea that in a guns-for-all polity cinemagoers could have started firing back in a darkened smoke-filled room is even more frightening.
Yet in an election year neither Barack Obama nor his rival for the presidency Mitt Romney dare say so despite the fact that the mass killer used a rifle, shotgun, two pistols and gas device all of which he purchased legally within the past two months.
There could be questions about the culture in which such things happen. The fight against crime of that most innocent of heroes, Batman, is rooted in the revenge he swore on criminals after witnessing the murder of his parents as a child. Over the years cinematic portrayals have grown more gothic and weird with some critics saying The Dark Knight Rises, the film on show that night, glorifies vigilante justice and wallows in sadism. The killer supposedly dressed himself like the Batman villain The Joker for his grim deeds.
Questions abound about that, about the killer’s family life, his lack of social skills, his immersion in computer role-play games, his increasing failure in his studies, even – as one more fanciful critic inquired – the “mind-altering” nature of his neuroscience research. It is not that there are no answers, only that they are more complicated, interlocking and unpalatable than an easy mad-or-bad dismissal implies.
The Mayor, of course, may have had in mind more metaphysical questions. President Obama acknowledged that when he stated “if there’s anything to take away from this tragedy it’s the reminder that life is very fragile. Our time here is limited and precious. What matters at the end of the day is … how we choose to treat one another and how we love one another.”
Value is no substitute for values: that’s the lesson our bankers have to learn
The resignation of Bob Diamond was instructive. Lonesome George Osborne, a man whose own future as Chancellor looks increasingly endangered, hailed it as “the first step towards a new culture of responsibility in British banking.” But the drawn-out process which led to Mr Diamond’s departure as chief executive of Barclays Bank shows just how much change is needed before our banks can regain the public’s trust.
When the news first broke that Barclays staff, including senior managers, had been lying to rig the Libor interbank lending interest rate, there was immediate resistance to the idea that Mr Diamond should go. He and three top managers offered to forgo their bonuses thinking that would assuage public outrage at the fiddling of the rate that affects mortgages, loans and credit-card rates worth trillions.
When they realised that was nowhere near enough the Barclays board decided their chairman, Marcus Agius, should walk the plank. It was not much of a sacrifice since he had been planning to leave his £750,000 pa part-time post next year anyway. But Mr Diamond must stay since his resignation, one big investor said, was not “a move that would create value”.
It was a revealing remark. The focus was not on right, culpability or responsibility, nor even on what were the reputational implications for Barclays. It was not about values, only “value”.
Over the past decade all that has been important in the world of high finance is how much money you made. By that yardstick Bob Diamond was a top performer. The deal he did for Barclays to buy Lehman’s US business when it went bust left his City peers in awe. No wonder the Barclays board was unanimous that their chairman was easier to replace than their chief executive.
So Marcus Agius went, issuing a statement whose language suggested it had been drafted by Mr Diamond rather than the old-school Mr Agius. At his level he would almost certainly have had no knowledge of anything as low-down as dude-trader Libor-fiddling. Mr Diamond, by contrast, was directly responsible at the time for Barclays Capital, the division responsible for the abuse. As a boss with a reputation as a very hands-on manager, he was either incompetent or complicit in a deception designed to calm market jitters about Barclays vulnerability.
Eat more slowly, a dietician once told me. Greedy people eat too quickly, she said. There is an insatiability about greed – until, that is, you realise you have overeaten. Bankers, it seems, have done the same thing with money. Not all bankers, their defenders say. Just a few. But I am not so sure.
The scandal of bankers rigging inter-bank lending interest rates is, apologists for capitalism insist, down to the criminal acts of a few individuals. Yes, it’s big and important, because the Libor interest rate they fiddled is used to set the price of $300 trillion-worth of loans all round the world – on everything from mortgages, credit cards and overdrafts to multi-million pound business deals. But it’s the fault of dishonest individuals not a structurally-flawed system.
Let’s examine that. Investigators from the Financial Services Authority have the names of hundreds of bankers inside Barclays, and hundreds more in other institutions, involved in at least 257 fiddles. Multiply that by 20 – the number of banks being investigated for lying about the Libor rate – and that could well be thousands of names in some of the most prestigious City institutions.
“It’s hard to believe that a policy that seems so systematic wasn’t known to people at, or very near, the top,” Barclays former chief executive Martin Taylor has said. The Chancellor, George Osborne, has spoken of “systematic greed”. The Labour leader Ed Miliband has spoken of “the swaggering culture” in which bankers responded to requests to fix the figures by saying “Done…for you big boy” or “Dude, I owe you big time” with the promise of a bottle of Bollinger.
The standard reaction to yet another crisis of confidence in our banking system is to say the rules should be tightened. Libor should no longer be fixed by bankers but by an independent regulator. Or it should be based on actual inter-bank lending rather than estimates. Or a Leveson-style judicial enquiry should be set up into the warped ethics of British banks.
There is a limit to what new rules in an old culture can achieve. The Cambridge philosopher Onora O’Neill pointed that out a few years back in her Reith lectures on Trust. Our society is ever creating new regulations, targets, audits and performance indicators to compensate for a growing lack of trust in modern life. The irony is that such measures appear to increase, rather than assuage, our contemporary culture of suspicion.
It takes a German word to sum up what’s wrong with English football commentators
It is the sneering rather than the missed penalties which have stayed in my mind after the England football team was knocked out of the Euro 2012 championships. The headlines have all been about racist attacks on the failed penalty-takers, both of whom happened to be black, but it is the weary cynicism of the football commentariat which is more revealing, and more pernicious.
There is something distinctively English about our indulgence in what Thomas Aquinas called delectatio morosa – morose delectation or pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. “Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth,” as the book of Proverbs puts it. In the Summa Theologica the Angelic Doctor insists that “the habit of dwelling with enjoyment on evil thoughts” is a sin.
Footballer commentators, however, do not reserve this vice for their pondering on opponents but direct it very much at their own side. Perhaps the worst is the BBC’s Mark Lawrenson who, throughout the tournament, minimised every English achievement and seized with peevish glee on every fault. This went far beyond objective analysis. “Typical England,” was his refrain at he constantly ran the team down.
To judge from Twitter that sentiment was common among many at-home supporters whose physical prowess is limited to the ability to slump further back in their sofa and reach for another beer. Even one of those decrying the racist abuse against penalty-missers Ashley Young and Ashley Cole opined that: “they should never have abused them for being black – they should have abused them for being useless!”. This is the hyperbole of common speech but theologically no person is without use.
Of course this is not a universal reaction. Many people shared the response that, though England didn’t play skilfully enough to secure victory in the quarter-final, it was impossible to fault their leonine effort. “Everyone has given everything they’ve got and that’s all you can ask for,” said the captain, Steven Gerrard. There was defeat but no dishonour. As the prime minister put it: “England showed a lot of heart, and a lot of spirit and a lot of dogged determination”. The players had “made the country proud”.
Turkey will not go to war on Syria – yet – but the region is becoming ever more unstable
When the Syrians shot down a Turkish military jet at the weekend Turkey’s government responded in a very measured manner. But the temperature was raised yesterday when the Turkish deputy prime minister Bulent Arinc revealed that Syria had then gone on to fire on a search and rescue plane looking for the missing pilots. It was “a hostile act of the highest order,” he said. Turkey is now threatening a military response against any Syrian forces approaching the long border between the two countries. Ankara has now revised its military rules of engagement.
This is an alarming development. Since the start of the uprising against President Assad in Syria – in which 14,000 people have died – there have been serious concerns that the violence could move beyond that country’s borders to spark a broader regional conflagration. Relations between Turkey and Syria have long been strained with recurring disputes over the border, water, Damascus’s support for Kurdish rebels and most recently the influx of Syrian refugees seeking safe haven in Turkey.
But just as significantly Turkey is a member of Nato. Ankara has approached the alliance now under Article 4 of the Nato Treaty which allows any member state to demand a Nato meeting if it believes its “territorial integrity, political independence or security” is threatened. Ankara has done that – only the second time in Nato’s history that a member state has invoked Article 4. In response Nato has condemned Syria’s attack “in the strongest terms” and said the alliance’s 28 members will “stand together with Turkey in the spirit of strong solidarity”. The incident, it said, was another example of the Syrian authorities’ disregard for international norms.
Referring the issue to Nato is a double-edged sword for Turkey. It summons the power of the alliance, but it also binds Ankara to take the advice of Nato members amongst whom there is still no appetite for military intervention in Syria. Nato works by consensus and all members must approve any action. Yet Turkey has pointedly refrained from invoking Article 5 of the Treaty by which an attack on one member is considered an attack on all NATO countries. Article 5 was last invoked, by Turkey, when Saddam Hussein threatened it after he had invaded Kuwait.
The politicians have failed on saving the planet: a mass movement of activism is now needed
The highway from the airport ran through miles of open fields when delegates arrived in Rio de Janeiro for the original Earth Summit in 1992. Twenty years on, with Brazil’s population having risen by 50 million, that same road runs through a sprawling conurbation of high rise flats. The change is some measure of the increased toll humankind is exacting from the planet on which we live.
A lot of high-flown rhetoric ushered in last week’s United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.Rio+20 was the biggest summit the UN had ever organised. Some 40,000 environmentalists and 10,000 government officials gathered with politicians from 190 nations for a meeting which the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said was “too important to fail”.
But fail it did. It ended on Friday with an unambitious non-binding statement which made few advances on what was agreed 20 years ago. Activists like Greenpeace International called it “an epic failure”. Technocrats like Maurice Strong, who ran the 1992 summit, called it a “weak” collection of “pious generalities”. Politicians like Nick Clegg called it “insipid”. No wonder in Brazil protestors ritually ripped up the final text and renamed the summit Riominus 20.
Perhaps it was naïve to expect better. All the signs had pointed to a lack of political will for real change. Over the last two decades only four of the world’s 90 most important green goals had seen significant progress. We’ve repaired ozone levels, removed lead from petrol and provided clean drinking water in the world’s urban areas. But there has been little done on food shortages, ocean pollution, fish stocks or desertification. We have been wiping out species and destroying rainforests at an unprecedented rate. Our planet is getting hotter; greenhouse gas emissions have risen by 48 per cent so that they are now not far off the level that scientists fear will trigger irreversible climate changes.
The problem is this: the agreements at the 1992 summit were based on a compact in which poor countries said they would green their economies if the rich countries paid for it. Poor nations would build factories and create jobs without creating more of the belching coal-fired smokestacks with which the rich nations had got the planet to such a precarious position in the first place.
But the simple polarity of rich and poor nations no longer applies. Some developing countries have become emerging economies who offer really serious competition to the West. Countries like China now want to clean up their environments and change their development models on their own terms. And while really poor nations still need foreign aid to adopt green technologies, rich countries aren’t feeling rich enough right now to stump up the required $30bn-a-year to fund the transition to sustainability
Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and David Cameron did not even bother to turn up in Rio. They knew that the summit’s final agreement would be big on woolly feelgood phrases and utterly denuded of the figures, dates, timetables and measurable targets to make it meaningful. Only seven of the agreement’s 287 paragraphs begin “we commit”; by contrast the feeble phrase “we encourage” features 50 times. Governments couldn’t even agree a process to stop themselves spending an insane $1 trillion a year to subsidise fossil fuels.
Yet for all that,Rio+20 was not a total waste of time. read more…
