There will always be reasons to be cynical
The backlash against Band Aid’s Ebola record is great news, one development academic said the other day, because it shows that the British public are developing a more mature attitude to aid. Oh dear. What it actually shows is that the jaded contrarianism of our metropolitan media elite has plumbed new depths of cynicism.
Ebola is out of control in countries with failed national health services. African countries where health is well-funded, like Nigeria and Uganda, have contained the disease. By contrast Sierra Leone, where the disease is worst, the health service is in ruins – after Western promises of aid have been broken. Ebola is a virus in the global body politic as much as in the bloodstream of its hapless victims.
Our ignorant media can’t or won’t see that. Instead of focusing on the politics of Ebola they have turned their sarcasm on Bob Geldof who has remade Do They Know It’s Christmas to raise cash to combat the disease.
The criticism has ranged from the fatuously ignorant to the wilfully misleading. There were complaints that the lyrics were factually inaccurate, as if the offering were a doctoral dissertation rather than a pop song. One paper, lamenting the lack of cultural sensitivity in the song’s imagery, then analysed the 1984 lyrics rather than the 2014 version. Others codded up bogus slights and rows with singers not invited to sing on the record, or who declined to participate.
One paper had a page-long tirade about Band Aid and Ethiopia even though there is no Ebola there. Another confused the original Live Aid with the Freddie Mercury Tribute concert at which David Bowie knelt to say the Lord’s Prayer. Yet another repeated the canard that Band Aid cash had been syphoned off for weapons – an untruth for which the BBC had to issue an unprecedented simultaneous four-channel apology.
Where critics did venture onto medical territory they were just as ill-informed. One misreported the Ebola incubation period. Another disingenuously muddling the annual death toll for AIDS with the ease and speed of contagion of Ebola which is far more frightening to doctors.
Accuracy went completely out of the window. Arguments about aid propping up despots, which are as outdated as the Cold War, were regurgitated. So was the line that Band Aid singers were propping up flagging careers despite the fact that most of them are currently at peak popularity.
Something else was being propped up. An internet search on many of the most vehement critics revealed that, until their attack on Band Aid, they had written nothing about either Ebola or Africa for months, if ever. It was as if their assaults, filled with false dichotomies and non sequiturs, were intended to cover that fact.
Other sneerers, who affect to care deeply in morally superior tones, seem merely attempting to create an intellectually respectable defence for their own inaction. There will always be reasons to say no, Richard Curtis once said.
Bad faith is at the heart of this backlash. But the British public see through it, which is why Band Aid 30 has outsold all the rest of the Top Five put together. A more apt Christmas No1 would be hard to imagine.
from the Church Times
FollowThe Ebola crisis is not a medical problem. It is a political problem. Bob Geldof, at least, understands that
There has been a tsunami of sneering over the Band Aid record to raise money for the fight against Ebola in West Africa. The fundraising effort, it is said, is aid pornography filled with unremitting negative stereotypes. “The story has become,” Bob Geldof said yesterday, “what a wanker Geldof is, how patronising I am to Africans and how Sky News cut me off for saying bollocks, twice… Everyone has forgotten that the real story is Ebola.”
Not quite everyone. Kevin Watkins is perhaps the UK’s most authoritative analyst of global aid policy. Now director of the Overseas Development Institute he is a former head of research at the United Nations Development Programme and at Oxfam. “There still isn’t a recognition of how serious the threat is,” he said. “There are small bits of good news – the rate of increase has started to slow in Liberia and Guinea. But the situation in Sierra Leone, where Ebola has got a grip in two urban centres, is really scary,” he said. “Last week there was again an increase in new cases. This could still skyrocket.”
It is not just Ebola. Medics on the ground report a big increase in measles and pneumonia, two of Africa’s biggest killers. Vaccination systems are breaking down. More mothers are dying in childbirth because clinics have diverted to Ebola. Food prices have rocketed. Hunger is widespread. Child malnutrition is rising. Joblessness has doubled. All this threatens to reverse decades of progress.
Bob Geldof is not just a celebrity fundraiser. After three decades of work on Africa he has nose for the politics and he has unerringly scented that Ebola is a political not just a medical problem.
Ebola is about poverty. If Ebola killed rich people there would have been vaccines 10 years ago. But the affected countries are at the bottom of the UN’s Human Development Index. Over 60 per cent of people are below the poverty line. Health budgets are a paltry $20 per person per year. There are just 187 doctors and 2000 nurses in all Liberia and Sierra Leone – for a population of 10 million. That’s a tenth of what the World Health Organisation says is the absolute minimum. Health services which are appallingly over-stretched ordinarily collapse under an epidemic on this scale.
The politics is this: the region’s health services ought to have been strengthened – and Sierra Leone’s totally rebuilt after its civil war ended 12 years ago. A massive aid deal was agreed by the G8 at Gleneagles after global anti-poverty campaigns including Make Poverty History and Live 8 in 2005. Great advances were made on debt and improved governance as a result. And Gleneagles put 40 million more children in school, gave life-saving drugs to six million people with HIV/Aids and halved malaria in eight countries.
But not all the promises were delivered. And West African health services were at the bottom of the list. It is true, as Geldof’s critics declare, that seven of Africa’s economies are among the world’s fastest growing. Ironically few individuals have done more than Geldof to build up consortia of Western and African private equity investors in the continent. Yet though parts of Africa are booming it still has the highest child mortality in the world.
“If the promises made in 2005 had been kept these health care systems would’ve been more effective and might have been able to contain the disease as has been done in Nigeria and Uganda,” said Adrian Lovett, a leading campaigner with Jubilee 2000, Make Poverty History, Save the Children and now with the global aid advocacy lobby One which has 6m members around the world. “Geldof is putting those broken promises back on the political agenda.”
You will not hear much of that in the UK since Britain has honoured its Gleneagles pledges. But Geldof was in France on Friday and in Germany earlier in the week launching Band Aid records there. In Berlin he caused a huge stir by publicly lambasting Chancellor Angela Merkel. Germany has no right to think of itself as the leader of the G7 when it cannot fulfil its promises to the world’s poor; German spending on Ebola is less than half what it spent on one football stadium during the World Cup, Geldof blasted. “He was firing straight at the political target,” said Lovett.
No doubt it would have helped had Geldof displayed a bit more cultural sensitivity with the tweaked lyrics of the Band Aid 30 record, and if he had included more African artists in the line-up. But, he countered yesterday: “It’s not about culture, it’s about politics. It’s not about being representative, or including artists I personally like, it’s about getting the biggest names to maximise sales which maximises pressure on the politicians in each place.”
He is happy to endorse the dozen or more Ebola records by African artists with their various messages to maintain good hygiene, change traditional funeral practices and trust doctors. “Each is aimed at their own market, which is right,” Geldof said, “as our record is aimed at ours.” Unlike most of his critics Geldof understands that market, which is why the single made £1m from downloads within five minutes of its release on primetime UK television.
But it is not about money. Even the most successful record will raise only a tiny fraction of the substantial amounts needed from the world’s governments to control Ebola. “But the record has a halo effect,” says Lovett. “It puts the issue of the chronic underfunding of these African health services in the news.” The music is incidental to Geldof. His real task is to hold the politicians’ feet to the fire.
Paul Vallely was co-author of the report of the Commission for Africa
from The Independent on Sunday
A few more Africans will drown. But it will be worth it.
A few more Africans will drown. But it will be worth it. Today the European Union takes over the job of patrolling the Italian coastline to protect us from illegal immigrants. The EU has only allocated a third of what the Italians were spending on their search-and-rescue operation which has saved 150,000 souls from over-crowded boats at risk of sinking in the Mediterranean. So more refugees will drown.
But at least that will send a very clear message to the racketeers who profit from this traffic in human desperation. Such is the shameless argument of the British government who preposterously appear to think their move will prick the consciences of the people-smugglers and stop them piling people into rickety craft for the perilous journey from Africa to Europe.
The Italian operation which ended on Friday was called Mare Nostrum, which is Latin for Our Sea. The name was a recognition of a common humanity. It was launched a year ago after 366 people perished in two boat disasters off the coast of Lampedusa. Since then it has rescued an average of 400 people a day. It saved too many, it turns out.
When the Italians complained to the rest of the EU that they could not continue to afford the €9m a month patrols the response of the other 27 members was not to share the cost – but to replace the operation with Operation Triton, named after the mythical messenger to the Greek Gods. Its message is a grim one. Just six ships, two planes and one helicopter will be available. And their brief will not be to scour the seas for those in distress but to stay within 30 miles of the Italian coast to keep intruders out.
They will be run by the EU’s Frontex organisation whose budget is tiny at €100m a year – a drop in the unwelcoming ocean compared with the €60bn Europe spends on farm subsidies. The UK is making no financial contribution to Triton. Britain’s immigration minister James Brokenshire made a mind-bending attempt to justify the government’s position in the House of Commons this week.
The Mare Nostrum rescue mission, he said, had created an unintended “pull factor” which had encouraged more migrants in makeshift boats to attempt the dangerous sea crossings. By way of proof he cited two facts. Before the Italian operation just 700 migrants a year died attempting the crossing. Once the operation began the figure leapt, with another 2,200 deaths in just six months. Ergo, the ministerial logic goes, the rescue system has caused an increase rather than a decrease in the problem.
This is either wilful sophistry or else a spectacular undergraduate logical fallacy. The contingency of two events does not necessitate a causal relationship. Mr Brokenthought offers no evidence to link Mare Nostrum with the increase in deaths – only a determination to look tough on immigration ahead of another by-election UKIP might win. For those who think a bit harder there are other answers.
Recent history suggests more plausible causes for the increase. The Middle East is in turmoil from Iraq and Syria to Libya to Gaza (from whence a family of 19 perished on the waves last month). Lebanon and Jordan are brimming with displaced people. There is war and anarchic violence in Sudan, Somalia, Mali, Niger and severe human rights violations in Nigeria, the Congo, and a desolate Eritrea from which 4,000 young people are fleeing each month to avoid conscription. Poverty and hunger are commonplace. The world population of refugees has just passed 50m for the first time since the Second World War.
And how can Mare Nostrum rescues have caused the 150 per cent rise in illegal immigrants coming into Greece through Turkey in the first seven months of this year? Or the breakdown of the fences around Spain’s north African enclaves? Or the storming of a ferry by 150 illegal migrants in Calais the other day?
The attempt by Britain to wash its hands of all this is particularly repugnant given our military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan (where withdrawal might now boost migrant flows) and Libya, which is the point of departure of many of the overcrowded ramshackle migrant boats. That ought to sharpen the moral imperative for us to help rather than hinder.
It is not as though there is nothing else we could do. But action needs to be taken long before migrants begin to cram into overcrowded boats. Where there are effective governments in North Africa, as in Tunisia and Morocco, the EU needs to use its considerable economic clout to encourage African states to manage migration outflows. We could provide close-to-shore patrol vessels for African authorities to intercept traffickers’ boats before they get far out to sea.
And the EU needs to do more to encourage all its members to take their share of refugees. Last year 70 per cent of asylum seekers where taken by just five countries: Germany, France, Italy, Sweden and the UK. Mr Brokenshire should be pressing for changes on the highwire of EU politics before whipping away the safety net from desperate people boarding death-trap boats.
There is a cruel irony in the inability of the EU to find ships for search-and-rescue at a time when key figures in Nato are talking loftily about using the West’s hospital ships and heavy-lift helicopters to conduct a night and day operation in Africa to tackle the Ebola epidemic. They fear the spread of disease. By contrast the dead bodies of boat people washed up on the shores of Lampedusa bring a contagion which is merely moral.
Paul Vallely is visiting professor in public ethics at the University of Chester
from The Independent on Sunday
Don’t be fooled – this was an extraordinary synod
The Church of Rome may think in centuries, as the ancient trope has it. But the attention span of the media is notoriously short, and seems to get shorter. The faster that technology gets the news out, the worse journalists’ historical memory appears to become.
I was in Rome last week during the Extraordinary Synod on the Family. I was not there as a journalist but to research a book. I had chosen that week because I thought the Synod would mean that most of the cardinals, bishops and curial officials to whom I wanted to speak would be in Rome then. But the timing also allowed me to observe the journalistic community at work on a story without being caught up in deadline perspectives myself.
The end of the Synod was met with headlines along the lines of “Pope Francis snubbed over moves to introduce friendlier approach to gays and remarried Catholics”. Liberal hopes dashed, tweeted the twitterers.
But what determined this conclusion was their own foreshortened news dynamic. The verdict omitted any appreciation of what an innovative event they had just sat through.
This synod was extraordinary in many ways. First, its agenda was based upon a questionnaire sent, unprecedentedly by a pontiff, around the world to discover the views of ordinary Roman Catholics on the teachings of their church on a range of controversial issues like pre-marital sex, contraception, divorce, remarriage and same-sex relationships. Previous popes did not want to know what the people in the pew thought – indeed when Cardinal Hume took the views of the National Pastoral Congress to Rome in 1980 Pope John Paul was utterly dismissive.
Next, Pope Francis angled the agenda by inviting Cardinal Walter Kasper to address cardinals on Communion for the Remarried, knowing that he would strongly advocate lifting Rome’s ban.
Then, at the opening of the Synod, the Pope made it clear that he wanted a strong and vigorous debate. People should listen with humility but speak with clarity and boldness, parrhesia was the Greek word he used. Nothing should be left unsaid for fear that the Pope would not like it.
The contrast with the last two papacies – in which debate was restricted and theologians silenced – was striking. In previous synods Vatican officials went round privately telling synod fathers not to mention certain subjects and upbraiding those who demurred.
Pope Francis certainly got the genuine debate he wanted. When an interim report on the discussion was produced halfway through – giving ground-breaking succour to gays and divorcees – it was met by strong dissent from a minority who felt their views were unrepresented and a final vote declined to endorse it in its entirety, prompting the Hopes Dashed headlines.
But the key votes got majority approval, and the section welcoming gays was within two votes of a two-thirds majority. A year of intense debate will follow, on not just the final document but all the process papers of the fortnight, before an even larger Synod next October. Huge change is afoot. Don’t let a few short-sighted headlines convince you otherwise.
Paul Vallely is author of Pope Francis – Untying the Knots
from The Church Times
What kind of ethics dominate our public life?
The alphabet did us a favour. It meant that the order in which we addressed the seminar was: Paul Bew, me and then Rowan Williams. It also gave, fortuitously, a logic to the argument.
A year-long series of seminars on Ethical Standards in Public Life was launched at the Von Hugel Institute in Cambridge last week. They set out to address the question “Is there a collapse of ethical standards in so many public institutions, or have we suffered from just a few bad apples?”
Lord Bew, who chairs the Committee on Standards in Public Life, set out its lofty brief to defend the Seven Nolan Principles of Public Life: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. In practical terms his latest initiative is to try to persuade the prime minister to set up an ethical induction course for MPs.
But there is a paradox here. In practice the ethical standards now set for our parliamentarians are among the highest in the world. And yet, said Professor Bew, the British public are 20 per cent more likely than the Dutch to say that our political system is corrupt – even though empirically corruption in both places is very similar and very low.
How can that be? My contribution offered two suggestions. First that the declining ethical standards of our public institutions merely reflect a decline in behaviour throughout society. We live in a more dishonest country than we did a decade ago. A survey in 2010 by the Centre for the Study of Integrity at the University of Essex showed the British public are more likely now, than we were in 2000, to lie on an application form, buy something which we know is stolen, or drive under the influence of alcohol.
Expense-fiddling MPs, greedy bankers, paedophile priests, policemen accepting backhanders and dodgy journalists are just the public equivalents of the rest of us dodging fares, keeping money we find in the street or failing to leave a note after damaging a parked car.
The second factor is that when society responds to this by tightening rules and regulations we merely increase levels of suspicion and mistrust. What is needed is a return to virtue built on good character. But how, when society increasingly rejects the perspectives of religion?
Rowan Williams offered some ideas. By abandoning the toxic assumption that other people are out to defraud us most of the time. By dropping society’s cynical reluctance ever to acknowledge and praise what is positively good. By asking ourselves what is the sort of person we want to become. And by remembering that we have responsibilities that we have not chosen or invented but in which we have been metaphysically immersed from the word go.
So, we might conclude, society needs both virtue ethics and a consequentialist calculus. The army needs rules but also honour. The judiciary needs case law but also a sense of natural justice. And the Church needs precise and aspirational theology but also a sense of mercy and compassion. The seminars, run in conjunction with St Mary’s University Twickenham, continue through the academic year.
Paul Vallely is visiting professor in public ethics at the University of Chester
from The Church Times
Virtue ethics or consequentialist ethics? Unpacking a confusion in British public life
Von Hügel Institute, St Edmund’s College, Cambridge & St Mary’s University, Twickenham
Inaugural Seminar on Ethical Standards in Public Life
9 October 2014
Paul Vallely
Consider the following letter of resignation:
I am sorry to confess that, going back some years, I have been unfaithful to my promises as a Catholic priest. I would like to reassure you that my actions were not illegal and did not involve minors.
As a result, however, I have decided to offer my resignation as bishop with immediate effect and will now take some time to consider my future.
I want to apologise first of all to the individuals hurt by my actions and then to all of those inside and outside the diocese who will be shocked, hurt and saddened to hear this.
I am sorry for the shame that I have brought on the diocese and the Church and I ask for your prayers and forgiveness.
At the end of September 2014 the Rt Rev Kieran Conry, the Bishop of Arundel and Brighton, sent his resignation to the Pope after admitting to an affair six years ago and apologising to congregations for being “unfaithful to my promises as a Catholic priest”. The words he used reveal something of our current confusion about public ethics.
He went on to say to the Daily Mail, whose Sunday paper broke the story:
It has been difficult keeping the secret. In some respects I [now] feel very calm. It is liberating. It is a relief. I have been very careful not to make sexual morality a priority [in his sermons]. I don’t think it got in the way of my job, I don’t think people would say I have been a bad bishop. But I can’t defend myself. I did wrong. Full stop.’
What we see here is the collation, and collision, of virtue ethics and a utilitarian consequentialism. He talks of the absolute. I have been unfaithful to my promises as a Catholic priest…. The bishop clearly knows that his behaviour has been inconsistent with his public calling. I can’t defend myself. I did wrong. Full stop.
And yet he goes on to mount, if not a defence, then a mitigation. My actions were not illegal and did not involve minors… I have been very careful not to make sexual morality a priority. I don’t think it got in the way of my job, I don’t think people would say I have been a bad bishop.
There is a tension here. He has admitted by his resignation – which Pope Francis accepted – that it is impossible for a bishop to venture moral judgements in one area when he has found himself so wanting in another. And yet he seeks to make a distinction between one area of morality, on matters of sex, and others.
This is a particularly vivid example from the recent news. (And I’d like to add, on a personal note, a very sad one, since I have always found Kieran to be an inspiring, kindly and generous priest.) And yet the bishop is not alone. Society in general is also unable to make up its mind about consequentialist and virtue ethics.
Virtue ethics has its roots in Aristotle and beyond. It focuses on moral character. A good person should be honest, charitable and benevolent. Good character comes from good moral habits and makes us the kind of people we ought to be. This notion has been the dominant one in Western moral philosophy until the Enlightenment after which it fell out of fashion and was replaced by the utilitarian ethic which defined the good as that which brought the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. Character began to be replaced by rules.
Not entirely. Virtue has survived as a code in some spheres of life. It is there in the moral habit which resides in the comradeship and discipline of the army. The rhetoric may be of King and Country but the practice of moral mutual interdependence relies upon the notion of a sacred band of brothers. It is there in the judiciary; a judge who commits a crime should quit the bench, as must a magistrate convicted of drink driving. It has a residuum in politics; a chancellor of the exchequer who becomes bankrupt cannot expect to continue in office. More generally a shop assistant who is caught with their fingers in the till cannot expect to easily find another job where they will be trusted to handle someone else’s money. Aspects of character are still refracted through some facets of public life.
But there has been general slippage. A Foreign Secretary who has an extra-marital affair is not now necessarily expected to resign. Virtue ethics might have suggested that a man who is prepared to betray his wife cannot be trusted not to betray his country. But the view that personal fidelity relates to public reliability no longer gains much traction. Today, as we see from the football field, winning is more important than fair play, as the very term “professional foul” discloses.
Actions are now most generally judged by consequences, and the focus for those consequences is tight and direct and utilitarian. Collateral damage is considered acceptable in ethics as well as in warfare.
“In what other job would a person who’d had an affair have to resign?” one liberal commentator asked recently, in disapproval of the resignation of the government minister Brooks Newmark after it was found that he had sent a graphic photograph of himself – in his paisley pyjamas – to a red-top reporter posing as a 20-year-old female Tory party activist. “Where else is sexual conduct considered anybody else’s business?” the Guardian feminist continued. “Why must politicians’ sexual morality be so abstruse, so distant from the codes the rest of us live by… Sometimes the heart wants what it wants and that erring is human. People are not shunned or shamed,” she concluded. “Grown adults can do whatever they like as long as both of them are over the age of consent”. Try telling that to the politician’s wife, four sons and daughter.
Several things complicate consideration of the private lives of public figures.
One is the notion of Public Interest, which many in the media (incidentally) find wilfully difficult to distinguish from What Interests the Public – such as paisley pyjamas. The Sunday Mirror defended its exposure of Mr Newmark on the grounds that he had chosen to campaign for getting more Conservative women into parliament. His requests for naked photographs from a woman he supposed to be eager to become a Tory candidate therefore constituted an abuse of an imbalance of power. Critics of the paper attacked the reporter for entrapment (there is a whole separate debate to be had about honeytraps, going back to Judith in the Old Testament, and when they are, and are not, legitimate). The reporter’s critics were on more solid ground in criticising his use of photographs stolen from the internet to lure the politician – a technique used on social media by paedophiles bent on grooming children.
It is worth noting, as an aside here, how such arguments complicate cloud the public debate on ethics is clouded by introducing both self-interest and self-righteousness. Those who attacked or defended both newspaper or politician, by and large, had vested interests in one side or the other. It often aids clarity in debate to disentangle motives from morality.
A second complication in considering the private behaviour of public figures is the business of Role Models. This is why, contrary to our Guardian feminist, we expect – and it is right to expect – higher standards from those in public positions, be they priest or politician, rock star or footballer, than apply in private life. The behaviour of celebrities, to use the term in its loosest form, is emulated by others, most particularly the young. Again moral equivalence does not apply, since better behaviour is expected of some than others, largely on the basis of their track record – which is why extra-marital bad behaviour by (I can say as a Man Utd supporter) Ryan Giggs was more shocking than by Wayne Rooney. Again we could have a whole debate on that. This series of seminars will be looking at a range of interesting areas – politicians, political parties, medicine, diplomacy, economics and whether the changing way we wage war shifts our ethical understanding of conflict and combat.
Is a purely secularist ethic sufficiently robust to sustain our public ethics? It ought to be, but it appears difficult. The shift from virtue to utilitarian consequentialism has led us into a deontological approach which increasingly emphasises not even duties so much as rules – and not just broad moral rules such as “Do unto others as you would be done by”.
We live in a more dishonest country than we did a decade ago. A survey a couple of years ago showed the British public are more likely now than we were in 2000 to lie on an application form, buy something which we know is stolen, or drive under the influence of alcohol. That is according to a 2012 survey by the Centre for the Study of Integrity at the University of Essex. But in one sense we already knew that. Scandals surrounding MPs’ expenses, greedy bankers, paedophile priests, bribes to policemen, dodgy journalism and football finance have raised question after question about integrity in public life. So it is no real surprise to discover that low-level dishonesty among ordinary people has been on the rise too when it comes to things like dodging fares, keeping money we find in the street or failing to leave a note after damaging a parked car. Women, it seems, have slightly more integrity than men, but social class and occupation do not appear from the survey to have any significant effect on levels of honesty. Thou shalt not be found out has replaced many of the Ten Commandments.
The general corrective approach of recent decades has been to introduce more rules and regulations. But, as Onora O’Neill pointed out, in her 2002 Reith Lectures, we are discovering that tightening rules merely increases levels of suspicion and mistrust – as individuals see regulations merely as more obstacles to be got around rather than as moral precepts by which to live. Once the spirit of the law is set aside, its letter becomes a hindrance to be circumvented in the game of winning at all costs. It was shocking to discover, in a survey to mark the 25th anniversary of the Big Bang financial deregulation of the City of London, that 86 per cent of its financial services professionals no longer know that the motto of the London Stock Exchange is ‘My Word is My Bond’. That’s 86 per cent. And the City, like the army and the judiciary, was at one time a core residuum of the approach and values of virtue ethics.
There is a paradox here. Trust is the glue which holds society together. Without it we could not even get up in the morning. We trust that the radio will tell us the right time, that the toothpaste will not be not poisonous, that other drivers on the road will try to steer safely. We trust that teachers are working to educate our children, and that our GP is not out to kill us. Life is simply too short to question the motives of everyone around us. Trust is the default mechanism of a civilised society.
Onora O’Neill suggests that in practice we all trust as much as before. What is different is that we all SAY we don’t. We don’t trust the food industry, but we continue to shop in supermarkets. We don’t trust the police, but we call them when there is trouble. We don’t trust journalists, but repeat much of what we read in newspapers. The problem is, says O’Neill, that we have misdiagnosed what ails British society, and so we are taking the wrong medicine. We are imposing ever more stringent forms of control and accountability. Yet ironically these often serve only to reinforce the fears they set out to allay. And those whom we refuse to trust become less trustworthy.
So there is consensus that we need to find ways of rebuilding trust. That was partly what lay behind David Cameron’s Big Society in 2010 or Ed Miliband’s talk, the year after, of “moral capitalism”. What all such enterprises need to discover are some mutually acceptable moral principles to underpin the process.
But those need to rely on something more than mere social consensus. More rules are not the answer, but greater integrity. Yet contemporary society is persistently moving in the wrong direction on this. We have ever more health and safety rules where we should have common sense. We have targets, which become perverse ends in themselves. We talk about ID cards, as if something physical could ever replace something abstract, like trust.
Religion has the language to address this deficit: we need to redirect ourselves towards what God means us to be. In Catholic Social Teaching the Common Good embodies a sense of virtue; our virtue is a contribution to the Common Good. But religion is out of fashion. As Alasdair MacIntrye said in After Virtue there still lingers in our society the urge to revere the ruins of Abrahamic ethics but our society has lost the wherewithal and understanding to rebuild on them. Philosophy has tried; in 1958 Elizabeth Anscombe wrote a seminal article, “Modern Moral Philosophy” which sought to rehabilitate Aristotelian virtue ethics while crystallising an increasing dissatisfaction with the forms of deontology and utilitarianism which have become increasingly normative.
The challenge of an institute like this, and this series of seminars, is to do what I hope in a much more modest way my writing strives to achieve – to take the insights of religion and virtue ethics and translate them into a secular language that has a wider popular appeal.
They’re only Africans. They may be dying from ebola in record numbers but who really cares? Such are the politics of plague. And then there is the politics of war. In Nigeria the Islamist fanatics of Boko Haram are stoning men to death and pouring petrol on women and burning them alive. Yet where is the talk of air strikes in Africa, let alone boots on the ground? The murderous terror-mongers of the UnIslamic State in Iraq are deemed to constitute a threat to the streets of the West. But Boko Haram, like ebola, is just another of the apocalyptic four horsemen which for ever stalk that far-away continent of which we know nothing and care less.
Of course no-one says as much in such bald terms, not even in the farage of plain-speaking that characterizes the demagogic rhetoric of our times. But it is hard to escape the sense that such is the reality of our political priorities.
This is not just the worst single epidemic of ebola in history. The frighteningly contagious disease, which kills up to 90pc of those who contract it, has now slain more than all previous outbreaks put together. Tens of thousands have died, far more than the World Health Organisation’s official figure of 3,300. Its progress is exponential; almost 40 per cent of the deaths have occurred in just the past three weeks.
How odd then that the news is dominated by stories about the one man who has taken the disease from Liberia to the United States. The Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, whose population are dying in droves, is quoted widely on the “unpardonable” action of the man who took the disease to the world’s richest nation. There are reports about how he will be prosecuted for falsely declaring, when he boarded the plane for Dallas, that he had had no contact with ebola. In the US there are in-depth accounts of the strict infection-control measures being put in place – the bubble tents, the reporting systems, the high-tech gowns and gloves – that will make sure ebola is swiftly contained.
Meanwhile back in Africa the news is of how, despite promises of Western aid, local health workers are not just lacking gowns and gloves but are even short of paracetamol and mattresses on which the sick can die.
The British government has announced a £100m aid package to build a series of clinics with 700 specialist ebola treatment beds. But that has been overshadowed by the revelation from MPs on the cross-party International Development Committee that British bilateral aid to Sierra Leone and Liberia was previously slashed by a fifth – doing grave damage to those nations’ health infrastructure. “The weak state of the health system in both countries has greatly reduced the effectiveness of the response to ebola,” the MPs declared.
The final grotesque metaphor for the gap between rich and poor has been the way that ethical concerns about the unproven nature of the experimental serum ZMapp were set aside so the drug could be given to British and American victims of the disease. But none was made available for Dr Sheik Umar Khan, Sierra Leone’s chief physician, who died treating those struck down by the devastating epidemic.
It was a grim parody of the principles of global distributive justice. But it violated even a utilitarian calculus. Saving the life of Dr Khan would have allowed him to save a greater number of lives than resulted from saving the life of a British nurse or American doctor.
But Dr Khan is merely a citizen of the global South. Such are the economics of international inequality. Africans are best treated, it appears, by quarantine; the US media has called for travel bans to cut off Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea from the rest of the world. Travellers always get round such interdicts; the only safe way to protect the world is to finance the fight against the disease at its source.
It is not just ebola. In Nigeria ruthless fanatics are lashing, amputating and stoning in the name of a perverted vision of Islam. Once terrorist guerillas they are now holding territory and proclaiming an African “caliphate”. Three million have fled their homes. People are taking refugee on mountain tops. Government troops are retreating saying they cannot match the firepower of the insurgents. A Nigerian air force pilot has just been beheaded on video. The parallels with Iraq are uncanny.
Yet here there are no American airstrikes as there are in Iraq and Syria. The Australian prime minister, Tony Abbot – who has become the first Western leader to deploy troops against what he calls the “murderous death cult” of the UnIslamic State – is not claiming that Australia’s streets, and those of the wider world, need protecting from an “unprecedented terrorist threat” in Nigeria.
Why not? Because, as with ebola, the deaths of Africans have no strategic, or even symbolic, significance in our global realpolitik. All this is not just deeply unjust. It is politically and epidemiologically myopic.
Ebola is one of the most lethal viruses known to humanity. It kills up to 90 per cent of its victims. There are around 500 new cases each week, according to the World Health Organisation, and the rate of increase is accelerating. The virus can mutate rapidly because, like AIDS or influenza, its genetic code is a strand of RNA, the less stable cousin of DNA. It could even become airborne. WHO strategists predict 20,000 infections in the next six weeks. The US Centre for Disease Control has warned of as many 1.4 million people infected by January.
But they will just be Africans. So that will be alright then.
Paul Vallely is visiting professor in public ethics at the University of Chester.
from The Independent on Sunday
So what did the Didn’t Votes tell us?
Amid all the hoo-haa over the vote on the Scottish referendum not many people seem to have given much thought to the “Don’t Knows” who turned into the “Didn’t Votes”. There is nothing new about not voting in British political life. In general and local elections large numbers of people often don’t bother. Politicians tend to talk disapprovingly about voter apathy but it may be that they just do not want to hear what the non-voters are really telling them. There is a widespread sympathy for the old anarcho-nihilist sentiment: “Don’t vote because whoever you vote for the Government gets in”.
Of course a referendum on independence is a different matter, which is why turnout was always predicted to be higher than in national and local government elections. But, despite the constant “too close to call” polls, even up to the week of voting, there were a significant number of the electorate declaring themselves to be Don’t Knows. Polls varied, with some saying the Don’t Knows were as few as 4 per cent but others placing them as high as 20 per cent. Between 12 and 15 per cent was the consensus.
There is more than one kind of Don’t Know. To borrow from the Donald Rumsfeld Book of Logic there are Known Don’t Knows and Unknown Don’t Knows. That is, some of those in this category simply hadn’t made up their minds until the last minute – or who had decided but who pretended they hadn’t for fear of emotional reprisals from friends and families. But others couldn’t or wouldn’t make up their minds when the polls closed.
The Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the Rt Revd John Chalmers, in a sermon on Sunday, cited the example of Elijah in the Book of Kings where he faces the people and asks them to make up their minds about their faith. He personally found making a choice was hard, the Moderator said, “because I’m one of those people who has spent a lifetime trying to see both sides of every argument, trying to work out complicated ‘middle ways’ that keep as many people as possible content. But I’m not going to get away with that this week. On this issue like the people of Israel standing before Elijah I need to come off the fence.”
I am not sure that theology helped that much here, any more than other factors like the emotional pull of music – Flower of Scotland versus Land of Hope and Glory – or the endorsement of celebrities. There must have been as many people repulsed as attracted by the tasteless comic Frankie Boyle or the anachronistic marchers of the Orange Lodge. The same was true of politicians, with the aggressive self-righteousness of Alex Salmond versus the impotent lacrimosity of David Cameron.
There were, of course, persuasive arguments on both sides – just as there were powerful repellents from those who implied that the other side were just a bit too dim to understand the facts. But in the end it may be that the Didn’t Votes were not unable to weigh the advantage of one argument over another but rather were paralysed by seeing the disadvantage of both. In that they may have had the most potent message of all for the rest of us.
The Church Times
Haunted by the death of the man in the Nani shirt
I have been haunted for weeks now by a single image. It is not a grim image, though it was part of grim event. It is the memory of a man in a football shirt hurrying to keep up with his fellows – hurrying, as it turned out, to his death. And yet the image speaks plaintively of the richness of human life rather than the closed cruel finality of death.
It was a Manchester United shirt. They are the team I support so I suppose that might have touched something within me – though I felt something similar this week when I saw a man in an Arsenal shirt lying on the ground, waiting to be shot.
The man in the Man Utd shirt was a member of the Iraqi army. In June he was taken prisoner taken by the jihadist zealots of the so-called Islamic State when captured a military base near Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein, who now looks the lesser of evils compared to what has followed.
The Unislamic State, or ISIS as they were called then, posted the photo in a sequence which showed captured Iraqi soldiers who had changed into civvies in a forlorn attempt to escape the advancing jihadist tide. One man had donned a football shirt with the name Nani on the back along with the player’s squad number, 17. He was being herded into with his fellows to a patch of bare desert were the men were told to lie down in a row and then were shot by a febrile firing squad.
I found myself wondering when he had bought the shirt. What hopes he had had for his footballing hero? Did he play himself and try to emulate his hero’s style? What had he thought about his performance in United’s disastrous season that year? This may sound trivial and disrespectful but it did not feel so to me. Rather it connected me with this man, singling him out from the crowd, allowing me to enter into this one particular seam of this far-away young life, summoning for me the hopes and dreams of the other dimensions of his life. In the killing of a man the whole universe dies.
And then this week came the photo of the man who had escaped one of the fanatics’ mass executions. He was ringed in the picture with the dead all round him. One of those who had not survived wore an Arsenal shirt with Ozil on the back.
It does not diminish the individual tragedy of the man and yet that shirt is some small symbol of hope. Mesut Özil is a German footballer but he is a third-generation Turkish-German and a practising Muslim who recites from the Quran before his matches. His teammates know that they cannot talk to him during this brief prayer.
Speaking of the way he plays he once said: “My technique and feeling for the ball is the Turkish side to my game. The discipline, attitude and always-give-your-all is the German part”. A few years ago he won a top award as an exemplar of successful integration within German society. All of which stands in contrast to the closed minds of the murdering jihadists. It is, in a melancholy way, a most eloquent riposte.
from The Church Times
Why the medical and legal authorities (and the media) really took against the parents of the boy with a brain tumour
It was just a little parenthesis but, between the commas, a thread of prejudice was revealed. “Mr and Mrs King” began the sentence. And then came the words “who are Jehovah’s Witnesses”. It did not just appear in one newspaper but in many of the first reports of the story of five-year-old Ashya King, the boy with the brain tumour whose parents had suddenly removed him from Southampton Hospital.
Others were more explicit, revealing that the thread was part of a backcloth of bias. Brett and Naghmeh King had taken the boy from hospital “despite” suffering from a brain tumour. Jehovah’s Witnesss, they noted, “refuse blood transfusions on religious grounds”. Hampshire Police had issued an arrest warrant for “cruelty to a person under the age of 16 years”. The bad faith of the Kings was taken for granted.
On Radio 4 the Today programme compounded the smear by using the case as the introduction for an attack by the novelist Ian McEwan on Jehovah’s Witnesses, with the interviewer, Mishal Husain, inviting him to extend his assault on religion more generally.
Mr McEwan’s latest novella, which has been criticised for its “formulaic” plot, centres on a high court judge who must decide whether a teenager who is not yet 18 should be allowed to refuse a live-saving blood transfusion. “Sometimes religious views run right against the grain of what seems rationally compassionate,” he told Ms Husain who tried to move the subject on to the Trojan Horse plot and extremism in schools, perhaps hoping that Mr McEwan would repeat his view that in the clash between the religious and secular imaginations “the secular mind seems far superior”.
What the novelist, the media and the hospital authorities had in common was a degree of religious illiteracy. Jehovah’s Witness may oppose blood transfusions but they offer no religious opposition to the chemo or radiotherapies the hospital wanted for Ashya. Mr McEwan has elsewhere complained about the “uninterrupted monochrome” of religion. Those who criticise faith have no credibility when they proceed from a basis of such ignorance.
A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, the doctors in Southampton no doubt thought when Mr King trawled the internet for alternative treatments for his little boy. But the same admonition applies to those who so blithely parade their religious prejudice.
Misinformation has dogged this case from the outset. The Kings’ objections to blunderbuss radiotherapy were not religious. They were medical. The parents wanted a more focussed Proton beam radiotherapy which is only used to treat eye tumours in the UK but is used on brain tumours in other countries. They did not from remove him from Southampton “despite” his brain tumour but because of it. However misguided that may have been, it was well-intentioned.
Perhaps that is true, too, of the authorities who told Mr King if he questioned their judgement they would exclude him with a court order, and then issued a heavy-handed warrant alleging cruelty by the parents. The irony is that their fear of cruelty ended in the actual cruelty of a small child lying alone in a foreign hospital – with his Mum and Dad in separate jails 300 miles away – surrounded by strangers he cannot understand.
from The Church Times
Religions need to be consistent and coherent on persecution whether in Iraq or elsewhere
Consider two statements. The hate that starts with Jews never ends there, said Rabbi Jonathan Sacks last week. The persecution of Christians in Iraq has been inexplicably neglected by the British government, said the Bishop of Leeds, the Rt Rev Nick Baines, in a letter to the prime minister. Both men were concerned with universal issues. Yet both highlighted specific concerns of their own faith communities.
Likewise Pope Francis this week stressed universality in his concern for Iraq. Members of religious minorities, “not just Christians”, are “all equal before God” he said, suggesting that force could lawfully be used against the so-called Islamic State to end the beheadings and crucifixions of those who refuse to embrace its perverse view of Islam. Yet the Pope’s views stood in stark contrast to what he said when the US was threatening airstrikes on Syria last year.
Then he vehemently opposed military intervention. Cynics might observe that, at that point, the Christians were largely escaping the violence in Syria’s civil war. Today, by contrast, Christians are in the frontline of persecution and are being driven from places throughout the Middle East in which they have lived for 2,000 years.
Bishop Baines’s accusation against the David Cameron’s government was that its policy in the Middle East was incoherent, unstrategic and merely reactive. With an approach which seeks simultaneously to oppose both sides in Syria’s civil war, there is truth in that – as there is in the accusation that our government has turned a blind eye to the persecution of Christians round the world.
The International Society for Human Rights estimates that 80 per cent of all acts of religious discrimination in the world today are directed at Christians. Despite that Western elites are largely in thrall to an outdated notion that Christianity, with its colonial and ideologically-dominant past, is a perpetrator rather than a victim. Anyone writing, until recently, to the Foreign Office to complain about Britain’s failure to address this has been greeted to a pompous politically-correct reply implying that anyone concerned about the ill-treatment of Christians must be some kind of religious bigot unconcerned at the plight of other minorities.
Even so, it is important that religious leaders do not focus on persecution only when it is their own adherents – in Gaza, Israel, Iraq, Syria or wherever – who are under attack.
Criticism of Israel is not anti-semitism, says Lord Sacks, and yet he decries a “rush to judgement… that if people are killed it is Israel’s fault”. Bishop Baines laments the government’s lack of “a coherent or comprehensive approach to Islamist extremism… across the globe” yet it is unclear what he wants the broader strategy to be to curb jihadi terrorists in Iraq, Syria, Nigeria and elsewhere. Pope Francis should consider whether earlier military action in Syria, or pressure on the Qataris and Saudi who fund salafi jihadism, might have prevented the spread of the savagery which now so repels him. Coherence is not merely the province of governments.
from The Church Times
Israel is under attack and has a right to defend itself. But the argument “They fire rockets at us, so we fire back” is not enough. A morality of equivalence is not enough in determining whether a war is just.
Classically there are six Just War criteria. The first three demand that there must be just cause, good intention and legal authority. Israel can claim all those, though lawful authority is incomplete; Israel may be a democracy, but many Palestinians in the region are second-class citizens, and there is no wider authority from the United Nations.
But there are three other criteria which are more problematic. Every other way of resolving the problem must have been tried first. There must be a reasonable chance of military success. And the means used must be in proportion to the end that the war seeks to achieve. On these Israeli conduct is questionable.
It is not necessary to kill people to defend yourself. The Iron Dome defensive rocket shield shows that. The fact that some Israelis are sitting on the heights, eating popcorn, watching the “entertainment” below, as Gaza is bombarded, is also an effective demonstration of the imbalance of power. And the key area on which the Israeli case founders is proportionality.
Over 1,000 Palestinians have died compared with 56 Israelis, only three of them civilians. More Palestinian children have been killed than Hamas fighters. The paucity of the argument that ordinary people just have to move out of the line of fire (after warnings that a bombardment is imminent) has been exposed by the shelling of the UN shelter, despite UN officials giving the Israeli military the coordinates of the shelter no fewer than 12 times.
Responsibility grows commensurate with power. The Israeli army is the most powerful in the region. The country is backed by the world’s greatest power, the United States. Its Secretary of State may harbour private doubts, as was shown when a microphone picked up John Kerry’s off-air sarcasm about Israel’s self-justifications, but Washington continues to support Israel politically and financially.
There are interesting parallels on power and responsibility. Democracies have more responsibilities than dictatorships, just as adults have more responsibility than children; tit-for-tat does not work in parenting. States have more responsibility than individuals, which is why the terrible fiasco over botched executions in the US has such resonance; the victims’ families may demand ‘an eye for an eye’ but the state has a higher moral purpose than vengeance. It is also why it will not wash when Rome says “the percentage of paedophiles in the church is no greater than in the general population”; we expect the church to be better than the world to which it preaches.
In Gaza it is by no means certain that the policy of bombardment has a reasonable chance of success of Israel’s stated objectives of ending Hamas rockets. Uprisings in the occupied West Bank suggest things could get worse before they get than better.
All this suggests Israel has passed a tipping point and stands increasingly condemned in the court of international public opinion.
from the Church Times
